Lexical Units for Inclusion

A lexicographer first should decide which items are to be included in the dictionary. A lexical unit chosen for inclusion in the dictionary may have the form of a single word (mug, cheese, or money). Besides words, other types of lexical units may be entered in a dictionary, too. These may include bound morphemes (pre-, -er, anx~, -o-) and

multiword phraseological units (kick the bucket in the meaning 'to die', to give someone the rough side of one's tongue 'to speak severely to someone').

But lexicological questions often arise: what is a word, an affix or a phraseological unit, and what should be considered separate senses. The compiler should explain his/her decisions to construe reliable entries.

Furthermore, the compiler must decide how many lexical items to include. The number of nametags a language can store is endless. It is not known yet how many lexical units there are in a language, even in the well-studied English language, so a dictionary compiler should follow definite restrictions.

Lexical units may be chosen on the basis of frequency of occurrence in oral or written speech, on the basis of their communicative importance, on the basis of their importance for a language learner or a native language user, his/her age or level of language proficiency. The principles upon which these choices are made should be explained clearly and implemented consistently.

2) Lexically Relevant Information

Dictionaries may provide all or some of the following types of information:

1. Information about the form of the unit (spelling and pronunciation).

2. The syntactic and grammatical class it belongs to by means of a part of speech label (for e.g., verb) and additional grammatical data (for e.g., transitive). (For the sake of saving space this information is abbreviated, sometimes even without periods and commas. When the editors of Webster's Third New International Dictionary decided to omit periods and commas after abbreviations in definitions — like adj., п., and v. they saved two million characters and 80 pages in each copy printed /Kraske 1975:35/).

3. Inflections and grammatical forms (for e.g., for the verb build its forms built, built will be given).

4. Information about the meaning of the lexical unit. It may be given by analytical definition — a paraphrase that presupposes a delexicalization of the unit (dust 'finely powdered earth or other matter on ground or on surfaces or carried about by wind') or by folk definition usually used in dictionaries for children (dust 'Dust is very small dry pieces of earth or sand that fly up from roads when traffic goes by'); by its synonym (dust 'fine fragments, grime, grit, particles, powder, powdery dirt'); by translation equivalent (dust 'пыль') or even by pictorial illustration (pictures, tables, diagrams). If a word is polysemous its derived meanings should also be presented in one of these ways.

5. Information about morphological derivatives. It may be given either in the same entry or scattered throughout the dictionary by means of run-ons.

6. Information about paradigmatic relations of the lexical unit. A dictionary may present the word's synonyms, antonyms, hyperonyms and hyponyms, converses, and even paronyms or confusables.

7. Syntagmatic information about the use of the lexical unit in a sentence, sometimes even seleclional restrictions are given. This information may be given in the form of verbal illustration or formal patterns.

8. Information about the semantic field or some other group to which the lexical unit belongs. For the word horse, tor example, other differently related words like its colour, its parts, or the equipment used for it may be given.

9. Information about stylistic registers of the lexical item.

10. Information about etymology of the lexical unit.

Compilers may choose some of these types or add some other information in their dictionary according to their general dictionary-making policy.

3) The form of presentation of lexical units and relevant information about them. Structure of the entry

In some dictionaries, usually thesauri, like Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases by Roget P.M., entries are in onomasiological order, going from a notion to the namc(s) it can be expressed by.

This dictionary was designed for scholars interested in "the Philosophy of Language" and in investigation of the mental lexicon structure. Those who would like to grasp the structure of the whole lexicon and begin their word search conceptually should start with the hierarchical arrangement of ideas, or conceptual categories, presented in the Synopsis of Categories. Roget singled out six major classes of categories: 1. Abstract Relations (existence, resemblance, quantity, number, time, order, power), 2. Space, including motion, 3. Material world, including properties of matter (solidity, jluifity, heat, sound, and others'), 4. Intellect and its operations (like acquisition, rescntion, comminication of ideas), 5. Volition (like choice, intention, action), and 6. Sentiment (emotions, feelings, moral and religious sentiments. These categories are further subdivided, and all in all there arc several conceptual categories in the Roget's Dictionary that are expressed in F.nglish by thousands words of different parts of speech and word groups.

Roget's dictionary was also aimed for authors who were "struggling with difficulties of composition". Those who look for a particular word (e.g., dictionary) and semantically similar words should start their search with the alphabetical index of words provided by the dictionary. The word dictionary would lead them to the entry with names for the concept List in the conceptual categories [Number] and [Abstract relations] (word list, lexicon, glossary, thesaurus, vocabulary) and to the entry with slightly different names for the concept Book in the categories of [Written language], [Communication] and [Intellect]: thesaurus, Roget's, storehouse or treasury of words, thesaurus dictionary, and synonym dictionary.