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Abstract
Modern trends in English lexicography
Table of contents
Introduction……………………………………………………….3
Modern trends in English lexicography…………………………...4
Conclusion………………………………………………………...10
List of sources……………………………………………………..11
Introduction
There is, however, another point of view on lexicography. Its supporters believe that lexicography is not just a technique, not just a practical activity in compiling dictionary entries and not even an art, an independent scientific discipline that has its own subject of study (dictionaries of various types), its own scientific and methodological principles, its own theoretical problematics. its place among other sciences in the language.
For the first time this point on lexicography was expressed with certainty by the prominent Soviet linguist Academician L.V. Shcherba. In the preface to the Russian-French dictionary (1936), he wrote: «I consider it extremely wrong that our qualified linguists disdain for dictionary work. How did she get such a ridiculous name «compilation» of dictionaries. And indeed, our linguists, and even more so our «compilers» of vocabulary, insisted that the work should be of a scientific nature and in no way consist in a mechanical comparison of some ready-made elements».
The last decade was marked by a significant rise in lexicographic activity and the release of a large number of Russian-language author's words of new types, the subject of the lexicographical description of which is paraliterature and its derivatives, namely comics, feature films and computer games, computer games, fantasy.
Lexicographers came to the creation of qualitatively new reference books from the point of view of the addressee, the issue of choosing sources.
It should be especially noted that the prototype of the new author's words are the projects of the projects of reference books created by readers for the works of the fantasy genre, which are of great interest among users. First of all, this circumstance is associated with the lack of professional reference books for modern works of the fantasy genre, which is difficult to understand without certain cultural, historical and mythological knowledge.
Modern trends in English lexicography
The modern period in the development of the lexicography of the English language can be called "scientific or historical", since it is based on the following concepts:
1) compilation of dictionaries according to the historical principle;
2) replacing the prescriptive or normative principle of compiling dictionaries with a systemic descriptive approach;
3) description of vocabulary as a system [1].
The first scientific dictionary was Roger's Thesaurus, but the pearl of English lexicography that best embodied these concepts is the Oxford English Dictionary, the largest lexicographic project of the 19th and 20th centuries. Work on it began under the auspices of the Royal Philological Society in 1857, with the first volume published in 1888 and the last in 1933. The dictionary is edited by Sir James Murray. Roger's thesaurus belongs to a special group of dictionaries - ideographic. In thesaurus dictionaries, vocabulary is organized according to a thematic principle. Roger began his work by dividing the conceptual field of the English language into four large classes: abstract relations, space, matter and spirit (mind, will, feelings). These classes are further subdivided into several genera, which, in turn, are subdivided into a certain number of species. Each species includes numbered groups. These groups (there are 1000 of them in total) are designated by words with a sufficiently broad semantics, which makes it possible to combine under them a number of words that are close in meaning [2].
However, soon after the publication of the dictionary, it became clear that it is very difficult to use it. Practice required a reasonable synthesis of the ideographic and alphabetical arrangement of words. So Roger added an alphabetical index to the dictionary, giving each word information about its place in ideographic classification. Roger's thesaurus should be recognized as an outstanding phenomenon in world lexicography. Its main advantage is that it was the first scientifically substantiated attempt to create a kind of mock-up of a logically ordered language dictionary.
Recently, in the lexicography of the English language, there has been a clear tendency to reflect linguistic phenomena in direct connection with the elements of culture, thereby describing the influence of culture on the formation of language. An example is Longman Dictionary of English and Culture, Macmillan Dictionary.
The study of lexicography is closely related to the problems considered in lexicology. Revealing the meanings of polysemantic words and ways of their representation in dictionaries, distinguishing homonymy and polysemy, synonymy of lexical units - these are just some of the problems faced by both lexicologists and lexicographers. Compilers of dictionaries use the achievements of lexicology in their works, and lexicologists very often turn to the data of dictionaries in their research [3].
Depending on the number of languages represented, all linguistic dictionaries can be divided into three types: monolingual, bilingual and multilingual. The last two types are often referred to as translation dictionaries.
By designation and purpose of creation, explanatory dictionaries are divided into descriptive and prescriptive (normative). In English lexicographic terminology, they are called descriptive and prescriptive, respectively.
Descriptive dictionaries are intended to fully describe the vocabulary of a particular area and to record all its uses.
The quality of descriptive vocabulary depends on the degree of completeness with which its vocabulary reflects the area described, and on how accurate the definitions of the meaning of the words presented in the material are. The best example of a descriptive English dictionary is the Oxford English Dictionary.
By the way the vocabulary is organized in the dictionary, a special type of dictionaries can be distinguished - ideographic dictionaries or (as they are often called) thesauri. An example of such a dictionary is Roger's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. Unlike explanatory dictionaries, in which dictionary entries are arranged in alphabetical order of the headword, ideographic dictionaries organize vocabulary by topic.
By the nature of the vocabulary, explanatory dictionaries are divided into general and private. Oxford English Dictionary, Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Random House Dictionary of English are general explanatory dictionaries because they reflect the entire lexical system of the English language, and not any part of it.
Private explanatory dictionaries should include dictionaries that reflect only a specific area of the vocabulary of the national language. Such are, for example, dictionaries of phraseological units (idioms), dialectal or slang dictionaries. The Oxford Dictionary of American Slang (1992) and the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (1999) are their own explanatory dictionaries.
Depending on the target orientation, dictionaries can be divided into general and private. Aspect orientation assumes the following levels of vocabulary description:
Phonetic (pronunciation dictionaries);
Spelling (spelling dictionaries);
Word-building (dictionaries of word-building elements);
Syntactic (collocation dictionaries);
Pragmatic (frequency dictionaries) [4].
Among other types of words can be called usus dictionaries (in English terminology "dictionaries of use"), the subject of the description is the features of the use of linguistic forms, especially those that can cause difficulties. Two varieties of such lexicographic reference books are dictionaries of difficulties and dictionaries of compatibility: Dictionary of Common Mistakes of Longman (1987), Combinatorial Dictionary of the English language BBI, edited by M. Benson, E. Benson, R. Ilson (1986).
Professor I.V. Arnold proposed her original classification of dictionaries based on the principle of oppositions to the distinctive features of a dictionary.
Some scholars refer to special monolingual and bilingual dictionaries terminological glossaries, concordances, dictionaries of antonyms and synonyms, borrowings, neologisms, abbreviations, proverbs, personal and surnames, toponyms.
Thus, in the history of lexicography, there is more than one classification of dictionaries. There are a lot of them. Summarizing the well-known category Dubichinsky V.V. One of the 9 differentiating bases developed their unification, one of which includes onomastic dictionaries from the point of view of culturology, that is, dictionaries of toponyms, anthroponyms, chrematonyms and others [5].
According to the most authoritative experts in the field of lexicography (in particular):
1) The desire for such a completeness of the characteristics of the word allows not only to understand it in a given context, but also to use it correctly in one's own speech. Thus, the transition to active type dictionaries is carried out.
2) Striving to overcome the traditional isolation of lexicography from theoretical linguistics in general and from semantics in particular.
3) Striving to overcome the traditional isolation of the dictionary description of the language from its grammatical description.
4) Transition from a purely philological description of a word to an integral philological and cultural description of a word-concept, with the involvement of elements of ethnolinguistic knowledge.
5) Updating lexicographic techniques and means: the introduction of "guides" for a dictionary entry, an assessment of the correctness of the use of one or another word in different situations on the basis of a representative "linguistic collegium". This method has already been successfully tested in the compilation of the Dictionary of the English Language "American Heritage", the material of which was tested by a collegium of one hundred recognized native speakers of exemplary of English language [6].
The main theoretical problems of lexicography:
1) the problem of choosing vocabulary for vocabulary
2) the problem of the optimal structure of a dictionary
3) ways of interpreting the meaning of a word in a dictionary entry
4) the means used by compilers of dictionaries to illustrate the use of a word in speech,
5) development of parameters that underlie the classification and quality assessment of dictionaries.
The theory of lexicography studies the history of dictionaries, their typology, and deals with the critical description of dictionaries.
Lexicography as a practice includes collecting materials, editing, preparing a dictionary, publishing it, presenting it, and organizing an advertising campaign.
The study of lexicography is related to the problems considered in lexicology. Highlighting the meanings of polysemous words and ways of representing them in dictionaries, differentiating homonymy and polysemy, lexical synonymy are just a few of the problems that both lexicologists and lexicographers deal with. Compilers use the achievements of lexicology in their works.
The field of modern lexicography presents a great number and variety of dictionaries of all types. Within English lexicography there are monolingual and bilingual general dictionaries, etymological and present-day English dictionaries, those which deal with jargon, dialects and slang. Modern lexicography distinguishes between historical and pragmatically oriented or learner’s dictionaries. Pragmatically oriented dictionaries are those which side by side with meanings of words recorded in works of literature register functionally prominent meanings, thus giving the readers a clear idea of how the word is actually used in speech.
Modern trends in English Lexicography are connected with the appearance and rapid development of such branches of linguistics as Corpus Linguistics and Computational Linguistics.
Corpus-based Linguistics deals mainly with compiling various electronic corpora for conducting investigations in linguistic fields such as phonetics, phonology, grammar, stylistic, discourse, lexicon and many others. Corpora are large and systematic enterprises: they contain conversations, magazine articles, newspapers, lectures, chapters of novels, brochures, etc. Among them The British National Corpus, Longman Corpus Network, Spoken British Corpus, International Cambridge Language Survey, etc. Corpus provides investigators with a source of hypotheses about the way the language works.
A large and well-constructed corpus gives excellent information about frequency, distribution, and typicality of linguistic features – such as words, collocations, spellings, pronunciations, and grammatical constructions. The development of Corpus Linguistics has given birth to Corpus-based Lexicography and a new corpus-based generation of dictionaries.
The use of corpora in dictionary-making practices gives a lexicographer a lot of opportunities; among the most important ones is the opportunity:
1) to produce and revise dictionaries very quickly, thus providing up-to-date information about the language;
2) to give more complete and precise definitions since a larger number of natural examples are examined;
3) to keep on top of new words entering the language, or existing words changing their meanings;
4) to treat phrases and collocations more systematically than was previously possible due to the ability to call up word-combinations rather than words due to the existence of mutual information tools which establish relationship between co-occurring words;
5) to register cultural connotations and underlying ideologies which a language has.
Some of lexicographical giants have their own electronic text archives which they use depending on the type of dictionary compiled.
Conclusion
Modern trends in English lexicography are connected with the appearance and rapid development of such branches of linguistics as corpus (or corpus-based) linguistics and computational linguistics. Corpus (or corpus-based) linguistics deals with compiling various electronic corpora for conducting investigations in different linguistic fields. Computational linguistics is the branch of linguistics in which the techniques of computer science are applied to the analysis and synthesis of language and speech. Computational lexicographydeals with the design, compilation, use and evaluation of electronic dictionaries. Electronic dictionaries fundamentally differ in form, content, and function from conventional word-books. Among the most significant differences are: 1) the use of multimedia means; 2) the navigable help indices in windows oriented software; 3) the use of sound, animation, audio and visual (pictures, videos) elements as well as interactive exercises and games; 4) the varied possibilities of search and access methods that allow the user to specify the output in a number of ways; 5) the access to and retrieval of information are no longer determined by the internal, traditionally alphabetical, organization of the dictionary, but a non-linear structure of the text; 6) the use of hyperlinks which allow easily and quickly to cross-refer to words within an entry or to other words connected with this entry. There are distinguished two main types of electronic dictionaries: online dictionaries and CD-ROM dictionaries.
List of sources
Babich, Galina Nikolaevna (2016). Lexicology: a current guide = Lexicologia angliskogo yazyka (8 ed.). Moscow: Flinta. p. 1. ISBN 978-5-9765-0249-9. OCLC 934368509.
Dzharasova, T. T. (2020). English lexicology and lexicography: theory and practice (2 ed.). Almaty: Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. pp. 4–5. ISBN 978-601-04-0595-0.
Dzharasova, T. T. (2020). English lexicology and lexicography: theory and practice (2 ed.). Almaty: Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. p. 41. ISBN 978-601-04-0595-0.
Halliday, M. A. K. (2007). Lexicology: a short introduction. Colin Yallop. London: Continuum. pp. 56–57. ISBN 978-1-4411-5054-7. OCLC 741690096.
Joseph, Brian D.; Janda, Richard D., eds. (2003), "The Handbook of Historical Linguistics", The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, p. 183, ISBN 9780631195719.
Popescu, Floriana (2019). A paradigm of comparative lexicology. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 19–20. ISBN 1-5275-1808-6. OCLC 1063709395.
