10. Classification of dictionaries

1. Object of description

1. Linguistic dictionaries (lexicons) give information about language units in various aspects.

In linguistic dictionaries the word itself is described, it is characterized as a language unit, its meaning, grammar, orthographic, orthoepical and stylistic peculiarities are reflected.

Usually linguistic dictionaries are divided into:

1. general or special;

2. unilingual or monolingual;

3. translating: bilingual or multilingual;

4. defining or explanatory;

5. universal (such as Big Oxford Dictionary, Webster).

2. Non-linguistic (or Encyclopedic) dictionaries contain information about objects, notions, things and events, being explained by language units. Encyclopedic dictionaries do not concentrate on words, they contain information of extralinguistic character.

The best known encyclopedias of the English-speaking world are “The Encyclopaedia Britannica” and “The Encyclopaedia Americana”.

2. Selection of vocabulary 1. Thesauruses – dictionaries which lack the principle of selection aiming at maximum fully represent all the words of a language and their usage in texts.

The word ‘thesaurus’ (from Greek — “treasure of words”, “store of knowledge”.

Peter Mark Roget (1779 – 1869) published the first ‘Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition’ (1852).

The aim of modern thesauruses is to provide a source of words that express the same idea or closely related ideas. The thesaurus is designed to help you find the words with which to express yourself more clearly, more effectively, more precisely. There are some popular versions of thesauruses:

1) Roget’s Pocket Thesaurus;

4) Collin’s Paperback Thesaurus;

5) Webster’s New Explorer Thesaurus.

2. Special dictionaries in which the principle of selection of lexis is presented according to different criteria (e.g. dictionaries of synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, abbreviations, terminological, dialectal, etc.)

3. Coverage

(the number of words being included into a dictionary)

1. Big

2. Average

3. Small (or pocket)

4. Number of languages in a dictionary

1. Monolingual (unilingual) – one language dictionary

2. Bilingual – two language dictionary

3. Multilingual – polyglot dictionary

5. Volume of Description

(functional peculiarities of a language)

1. Common literary language

2. Language of science and technology

3. Language of territory

4. Dialects

6. Way of language unit description

1. General dictionaries contain multiaspect word description (e.g. explanatory dictionaries)

2. Special dictionaries reveal only some aspects of words or relations between them (e.g. etymological, wordbuilding, orphographical, dictionary of collocations, etc.)

11. Hierarchical vs. Non-hierarchical relationships within the lexicon

1. Hierarchical Relations

Taxonomies

The taxonomy relation is a relation which associates an entity (hyponym) of a certain type to another entity (hyperonym) of a more general type.

Taxonomy introduces a type/subtype relation:

Plant — flower, tree, bush, grass

Taxonomies usually have up to 7 levels that correspond to different levels of genericity. However, taxonomies of technical terms may be much deeper. It is also important to note that in some cases, certain nodes do not have any corresponding word in a given language; whereas they have one in another language. A taxonomy may thus have holes.

Meronymies

Meronymies describe the part-whole relation. It is a fairly complex relation which attempts to take into account the degree of differentiation of the parts with respect to the whole and also the role that these parts play with respect to their whole (целое и часть)

Meronymies can be characterized perhaps in a slightly too restrictive way:

Car — back door, seat, engine, wheel

Similarly to taxonomies, the meronymy relation cannot really be conceived between two elements, but should be conceived with respect to the set of all the parts forming the whole.

2. Non-Hierarchical relations

Among non-hierarchical relations we mainly distinguish synonyms and the different forms of opposition (antonyms).

Synonyms

Two words are synonyms if they have a significant similar semantic content.

Synonyms have a significant semantic overlap, but the degree of synonymy is not necessarily related to that overlap. Synonyms often do not depend on the degree of precision of the semantic descriptions, but their degree of synonymy may however change at different levels of granularity.

Absolute synonyms

if it exists at all, it is quite rare. Absolute synonyms would be able to be substituted one for the other in any context in which their common sense is denoted with no change to truth value, communicative effect, or 'meaning’

Contextual synonyms

W1 and W2 are synonyms in the context C.

Antonyms and Opposites

A basic definition could be that W1 and W2 are antonyms or opposites if they have most semantic characteristics in common but if they also differ in a significant way on at least one essential semantic dimension.

As with synonyms, antonyms and opposites represent highly contextualized relations. There are also various degrees of opposition: some pairs of word-senses are more prototypically opposites than others.

Antonyms refer to gradable properties and opposites to non-gradable ones.

Antonyms

(good and bad)

Antonyms do not necessarily partition the conceptual space into two mutually exclusive compartments which cover the whole conceptual domain. Some overlap or space in between is possible, as in good and bad, since it is indeed possible to say that something is neither good nor bad, or, possibly, to say that something is both good and bad.

Opposites

(father and mother)

An interesting class among opposites are directional opposites. They represent either basic, topological, or conceptual (metaphorical) directional oppositions. In this class, which is conceptually relatively simple, fall examples such as: start – finish, top – bottom, descend – ascend.

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