Corpus-Based Lexicography

Corpora occupy a special place in the study of language. The importance of corpora for language researches is aligned to the importance of empirical data. Empirical data enable the linguist to make objective statements, rather than those, which are subjective, or based upon the individual’s own, internalised cognitive perception of language. 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 recent development of corpus linguistics has given birth to corpus-based lexicography and a new corpus-based generation dictionaries. For example, the COBUILD English Dictionary n the Bank of English — the corpus of 20 million words in contempt" English developed at the Birmingham University. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English used the British National Corpus.

The British National Corpus is a very large (over 100 million words ) corpus of modern English, both spoken and written. It designed to represent as wide range of modern British En possible. The written part (90%) includes, for example, extracts from regional and national newspapers, specialist periodicals and journals for all ages and interests, academic books and popular fiction, published and unpublished letters and memoranda, school and university essays, among many other kinds of text. Texts are selected for inclusion in the corpus according to three independent selection criteria: domain (75 % of texts from informative writings, e.g. from the fields of applied sciences or art, etc.; 25 % from imaginative writings — literary and creative works), time (mostly texts since 1975) and medium (60 % of written texts are books, 25 % — periodicals).

The spoken part (10 %) of the British National Corpus includes a large amount of unscripted informal conversation, recorded by volunteers selected from different age, region and social classes in a demographically balanced way, together with spoken language collected in all kinds of different contexts, ranging from formal business or government meetings to radio shows and phone-ins. The use of corpora in dictionary-making practices gives a compiler alot of opportunities; among the most important ones is the opportunity:

1) to produce and revise dictionaries much more quickly than before, thus providing up-to-date information about 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 due to the open-ended (constantly growing) monitor corpus;

4) to describe usages of particular words or phrases typical of particular varieties and genres as corpus data contains a rich amount of textual information — regional variety, author, date, part-of-speech tags, genre, etc.;

5) to organize easily examples extracted from corpora into more in meaningful groups for analysis and describe/present them laying special stress on their collocation. For example, by sorting the right-hand context of the word alphabetically so that it is possible to see all instances of a particular collocate together;

6)to treat phrases and collocations more systematically than was previously possible due to the ability to call up word-combinations rather words and due to the existence of mutual information tools which establish relationships between co-occurring words;

13) to register cultural connotations and underlying ideologies which a language has.

Computational lexicography deals with the design, compilation, use and evaluation of electronic (electronically readable/ machine readable) 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 asinteractive 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 longerdetermined 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.

In case of electronic dictionaries the demands on the user become greater as the emphasis is less on following a predetermined path through the dictionary structure and more on navigating relationships across and within entries via a choice of links. So before using an electronic dictionary it is necessary to acquire certain navigational and searching skills apart from the 'conventional dictionary skills'.

There are distinguished 2 main types of electronic dictionaries: on-line dictionaries and CD-ROM dictionaries. To use on-line dictionaries it is necessary to have access to the Internet. To install CD-ROM dictionaries on a computer it is necessary to ensure that a computer meets the minimum system requirements that are usually enumerated in the User Guide.

QUESTIONS

1.What is lexicography? 2. What is the term dictionary used to denote? 3 What are the main principles of classification of dictionaries? What types of dictionaries can be singled out according to these principles? 3 What do you know f bout encyclopaedic and linguistic dictionaries? 4 What is the difference between general and restricted dictionaries? 5 What information do explanatory and specialized dictionaries provide? 7. According to what principle are dictionaries divided into monolingual and bilingual? 8What dictionaries are called (a) diachronic and (b) synchronic? 9 What are the most important problems of lexicography? 10. What questions are necessary to consider while choosing lexical items for inclusion? 11. What are the two modes of presentation of entries? 12. What is the most complicated type of entry? 13. What are the three different ways in which the word meanings art be arranged? 14In what ways may meanings of words be defined? 15. What can illustrative material clarify? What are the sources of illustrative examples? 16. What are modern trends in lexicography connected with? 17. What is corpus (or corpus-based) linguistics? 18. What is computational linguistics? 19. What does computational lexicography deal with?

20 Practical task.

1. What is the title of the dictionary?

2. Who is the publisher? Who is its editor? Where was it published and when?

3. What is the latest copyright date? (Look on the back of 2 title page.)

4. How many entries does the dictionary contain?

5. To what type of dictionaries does the wordbook under analysis belong?

6. Examine the table of contents. What is the title of the largest part or section of the dictionary?

7. On what page does the introductory article describing and explaining the dictionary begin?

8.Where does the complete key to pronunciation appear?

9.On what page does your dictionary list the abbreviations used in the dictionary? Are abbreviations, such as A.D., B.C., and TOEFL,explained in the body of your dictionary or in a separate section at the back?

10. Are guides to spelling, punctuation, and capitalization given? If so, list the page on which each begins. Are spelling variants listed in the dictionary?

11. Is there a section giving the meaning of commonly used signs and symbols? If so, give the page it begins on.

12. Does your dictionary provide derivations of words? If so, do they appear near the beginning or at the end of an entry? Are derivatives entered separately or are they entered under the words from which they are derived? How are compounds and phraseo­logical units listed?

15. Are the names of important people and places listed in the body of your dictionary or in a separate section?

16. Are the names of literary, mythological, and Biblical characters listed in the body of your dictionary or in a special section? To find out, look up Hamlet, Pandora, Mrs, Malaprop, Pygmalion, Hero and Leander.

17. What labels does the dictionary use to record variations in usage with time, place and social group?

18. Does the dictionary distinguish British and American vari­ants in spelling, pronunciation and meaning?

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