Modern trends in English lexicography

MODERN ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY

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 LEXICOGRAPHY

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 describe usages of particular words or phrases typical of particular varieties and genres;

5) to organize easily examples extracted from corpora into more meaningful groups for analysis and describe/present them laying special stress on their collocation.

6) 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;

7) 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.

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