THE EVALUATION OF DISABILITY-RELATED TERMS IN KBBI: A CORPUS-BASED LEXICOGRAPHY STUDY

Abstract

As a descriptive-prescriptive monolingual dictionary, Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI) or the Great Dictionary of Indonesian Language, records all kinds of linguistic phenomena, including slang, jargon, etc., found in Indonesian language. At the same time, it functions as the source of Indonesian language learning by providing standard and non-standard vocabularies. Therefore, it should adhere to Indonesian language corpora in the entry selection as well as in defining each concept. Unfortunately, the disability-related entries and their definitions in KBBI do not appropriately represent disability concept and become the incessant issues, mainly among people with disability. In this article, we try to solve these issues by doing evaluation of three disability-related entries in KBBI. For the purpose of this study, we use the Indonesian corpus selected in the period of 2010—2020, taken from the Leipzig Corpora Collection. Then, we analyze the corpus data to find the word frequency, collocations, and concordances of the words cacat (‘disabled; disability’), disabilitas (‘disability’), and difabel (‘disability’). The semantic fields of the collocations are determined based on the USAS Semantic System to find out the senses of the words. Next, based on the analysis of collocations and concordances, we decide which terms need evaluation. This evaluation shows that the definitions of the words cacat, penyandang cacat, and difabel are not adhered to the corpus evidence. Finally, we give appropriate recommendations for some improvements.  

Keywords: disability, monolingual dictionary, lexicography, corpus linguistics