Section IX lexicography

Lexicography as the theory and practice of compiling dictionaries. Linguistic dictionaries vs encyclopaedic dictionaries. Different types of linguistic dictionaries: unilingual (explanatory), bilingual (translation), multilingual, diachronic, synchronic, general, special, rhyming (reverse) dictionaries. Thesaurus type dictionaries. Special dictionaries: technical dictionaries, glossaries, pronouncing dictionaries, dictionaries of abbreviations, neologisms, borrowings, surnames, toponyms, phraseology, proverbs and sayings, slang, synonyms, antonyms, americanisms. Concordances. Encyclopaedias, reference books.

Problems the lexicographer is confronted with. Selection of lexical units. Arrangement of entries. Selection and arrangement of meanings. Definition of meanings. Illustrative examples. Setting of the entry. Providing adequate equivalents in the cognate language. The history of dictionary making for the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary. The American Dictionary of the English Language.

Working Definitions of Principal Concepts

Lexicography	the theory and practice of compiling dictionaries
Dictionary	a book listing words of a language with their meanings, and often pronunciation, usage, origin, etc.
Unilingual (explanatory) dictionary	a dictionary, in which the words and their definitions belong to the same language
Bilingual (translation) dictionaries	a dictionary that explains words by giving their equivalents in another language
Frequency dictionary	a dictionary in which the word is followed by a record of its frequency of occurrence
Rhyming (reverse) dictionary	a dictionary in which words are arranged in alphabetical order starting with their final letter
Technical dictionaries	dictionaries which register and explain scientific and other special terms for various branches of knowledge, art, etc.
Glossary	a unilingual dictionary usually applied to some text and explaining special, for example, technical, obsolete, etc. words from that text
Concordance	a dictionary recording the complete vocabulary of some author
Idiographic dictionary (thesaurus)	a dictionary in which words are grouped by the concepts expressed

Read the passage given below.

The field of modern lexicography presents a great number and variety of dictionaries of all types. Within English lexicography alone there are unilingual and bilingual general dictionaries, etymological and present-day English dictionaries, those which deal with jargon, dialects and slang.

Things are further complicated by the fact the name dictionary is regularly used in the titles of books which are not dictionaries in the proper sense of the word, but encyclopedias. As distinct from encyclopedia, a dictionary presents a systematic description of the vocabulary of a given language highlighting the special features of lexical items: their orthography, pronunciation, etymology, grammar as well as semantic and pragmatic characteristics. All these aspects of representation are discoverable in dictionaries where words, their differences and similarities, become the priority. For example, a dictionary distinguishes between neutral and stylistically coloured (emotive) vocabulary and uses a special set of labels indicating the stylistic values of words: archaic, colloquial, dated, derogatory, euphemistic, slang, formal, literary, jocular, etc.

The tradition of English lexicography goes back to A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson published in 1755. From the 17^th century the necessity of a general all-inclusive dictionary had become a must for lexicographers who started to expand the scope of their works, making reference books for a wide range of people.

Unilingual dictionaries for general use, like the Oxford English Dictionary (1859-1933), were characterized by “global coverage” aiming at including every word occurring in the literature of the language. The learner’s dictionaries, by contrast, quite properly, imply a certain degree of selection and intervention in presenting and interpreting raw language data for the benefit of language learners. They select that part of language vocabulary which is judged to be of value to its users.

The question of how to classify the enormous diversity of existing dictionaries into types or genres has a long history of its own and can be satisfactorily looked into if we take into account all the various factors, such as intended functions, target users, informational content, and so on. Ladislav Zgusta in his Manual of Lexicography proposes the following criteria. First of all he divides dictionaries into diachronic (which are primarily concerned with the history of the language and the development of words in the course of time) and synchronic (which deal with language vocabulary at one stage of its development). From the point of view of language coverage dictionaries can be general, if the standard language or its core is described, and restricted. The information contained in the dictionary can be confined to a given type or variety of words, for example, there are dictionaries of dialects, synonyms, idioms, specialized vocabularies, and professional terminologies. The next division is made on the basis of the number of languages used in the dictionary. In monolingual (or unilingual) dictionaries only one language is presented (in other words, the lexicon of a language is described and defined by means of the same language). Two languages are represented in bilingual dictionaries (in recent works the term interlingual is even more often used) [18].

1. Explain the difference between the terms ‘dictionary’ and ‘encyclopedia’.

2. List the criteria used to classify dictionaries.