Short presentation of EuroComDidact ToGo

The following description is addressed to linguists, language teachers, students of Romance languages and advanced autonomous learners.

The app is based on the basic inventory share of the Core Vocabulary of Romance Plurilingualism (CVRP). Generally, it comprises words whose frequency range is below 50002.

Selection of the vocabulary: The CVRP list is compiled from frequency glossaries which collect data from text corpora of millions and millions of word-forms (tokens). It is completed on the basis of traditional basic vocabularies which incorporate entries of obvious pedagogic relevance (classroom, blackboard, chalk; ticket, to go by train, etc.). Often, such words escape from electronically based computation, as frequency and range values are situated beyond defined frequency barriers. That is why both, the CVRP-list as well as the app, link the reliability of corpus linguistic based evidence concerning word frequency, frequency range and spread with intercultural communication relevance-criteria given by pedagogic expertise. It goes without saying that the app benefits from that.

Extension of the app’s series: More than bilingual lexicography, plurilingual dictionary making encounters thorny questions affecting synonymy, homonymy, polymorphy, and the general arbitrariness of the relationship between the word forms and meanings (especially when interlingual assignments are needed). In plain language, there is no unique, clear and always applicable rule for assigning corresponding word forms and significations to various languages. Thus, the CVRP series too sometimes show a certain arbitrariness, as following examples (concerning the semantic nucleuses of ‘deep, below, under, beneath’ and ‘bird’, sorted to French) demonstrate: