Productive Types of Compound Adjectives 11 страница
1 It is common practice to call such word-books English-English dictionaries. But this label cannot be accepted as a term for it only points out that the English words treated are explained in the same language, which is typical not only of this type of dictionaries (cf. synonym-books).
213
§ 5. Specialised Dictionaries
Phraseological dictionaries in England and America have accumulated vast collections of idiomatic or colloquial phrases, proverbs and other, usually image-bearing word-groups with profuse illustrations. But the compilers’ approach is in most cases purely empiric. By phraseology many of them mean all forms of linguistic anomalies which transgress the laws of grammar or logic and which are approved by usage. Therefore alongside set-phrases they enter free phrases and even separate words.1 The choice of items is arbitrary, based on intuition and not on any objective criteria. Different meanings of polysemantic units are not singled out, homonyms are not discriminated, no variant phrases are listed.
An Anglo-Russian Phraseological Dictionary by A. V. Koonin published in our country has many advantages over the reference books published abroad and can be considered the first dictionary of English phraseology proper. To ensure the highest possible cognitive value and quick finding of necessary phrases the dictionary enters phrase variants and structural synonyms, distinguishes between polysemantic and homonymic phrases, shows word- and form-building abilities of phraseological units and illustrates their use by quotations.
New Words dictionaries have it as their aim adequate reflection of the continuous growth of the English language.
There are three dictionaries of neologisms for Modern English. Two of these (Berg P. A Dictionary of New Words in English, 1953; Reifer M. Dictionary of New Words, N. Y., 1955) came out in the middle of the 50s and are somewhat out-of-date. The third (A Dictionary of New English. A Barnhart Dictionary, L., 1973) is more up-to-date.
The Barnhart Dictionary of New English covers words, phrases, meanings and abbreviations which came into the vocabulary of the English language during the period 1963 — 1972. The new items were collected from the reading of over half a million running words from US, British and Canadian sources — newspapers, magazines and books.
Dictionaries of slang contain elements from areas of substandard speech such as vulgarisms, jargonisms, taboo words, curse-words, colloquialisms, etc.
|
|
|
The most well-known dictionaries of the type are Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English by E. Partridge, Dictionary of the Underworld: British and American, The American Thesaurus of Slang by L. V. Berry & M. Den Bork, The Dictionary of American Slang by H. Wentworth and S. B. Flexner.
Usage dictionaries make it their business to pass judgement on usage problems of all kinds, on what is right or wrong. Designed for native speakers they supply much various information on such usage problems as, e.g., the difference in meaning between words like comedy, farce and burlesque, illusion and delusion, formality and formalism, the proper pronunciation of words like foyer, yolk, nonchalant, the plural forms of the nouns flamingo, radix,
1 E. g. A Desk-Book of Idioms and Idiomatic Phrases by F. N. Vizetelly and L. G. De Bekker includes such words as cinematograph, dear, (to) fly, halfbaked, etc.
214
commander-in-chief, the meaning of such foreign words as quorum, quadroon, quattrocento, and of such archaic words as yon, yclept, and so forth. They also explain what is meant by neologisms, archaisms, colloquial and slang words and how one is to handle them, etc.
The most widely used usage guide is the classic Dictionary of Modern English Usage by N. W. Fowler. Based on it are Usage and Abusage, and Guide to Good English by E. Partridge, A Dictionary of American English Usage by M. Nicholson, and others. Perhaps the best usage dictionary is A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage by B. Evans and C. Evans. (N. Y., 1957).
Dictionaries of word-frequency inform the user as to the frequency of occurrence of lexical units in speech, to be more exact in the “corpus of the reading matter or in the stretch of oral speech on which the word-counts are based.
Most frequency dictionaries and tables of word frequencies published in English-speaking countries were constructed to make up lists of words considered suitable as the basis for teaching English as a foreign language, the so-called basic vocabulary. Such are, e.g., the E. Throndike dictionaries and M. West’s General Service List.
Other frequency dictionaries were designed for spelling reforming, for psycholinguistic studies, for an all-round synchronic analysis of modern English, etc.
|
|
|
In the 50s — 70s there appeared a number of frequency dictionaries of English made up by Soviet linguo-statisticians for the purposes of automatic analysis of scientific and technical texts and for teaching-purposes (in non-language institutions).
A Reverse dictionary is a list of words in which the entry words are arranged in alphabetical order starting with their final letters.
The original aim of such dictionaries was to indicate words which form rhymes (in those days the composition of verse was popular as a very delicate pastime). It is for this reason that one of the most well-known reverse dictionaries of the English language, that compiled by John Walker, is called Rhyming Dictionary of the English Language. Nowadays the fields of application of the dictionaries based on the reverse order (back-to-front dictionaries) have become much wider. These word-books are indispensable for those studying the frequency and productivity of certain word-forming elements and other problems of word-formation, since they record, in systematic and successive arrangement, all words with the same suffixes and all compounds with the same terminal components. Teachers of English and textbook compilers will find them useful for making vocabulary exercises of various kinds. Those working in the fields of language and information processing will be supplied with important initial material for automatic translation and programmed instruction using computers.
Pronouncing dictionaries record contemporary pronunciation. As compared with the phonetic characteristics of words given by other dictionaries the information provided by pronouncing dictionaries is much more detailed: they indicate variant pronunciations
215
(which are numerous in some cases), as well as the pronunciation of different grammatical forms.
The world famous English Pronouncing Dictionary by Daniel Jones, is considered to provide the most expert guidance on British English pronunciation. The most popular dictionary for the American variant is A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English by J. S. Kenyon and T. A. Knott.
|
|
|
Etymological dictionaries trace present-day words to the oldest forms available, establish their primary meanings and give the parent form reconstructed by means of the comparative-historical method. In case of borrowings they point out the immediate source of borrowing, its origin, and parallel forms in cognate languages.
The most authoritative of these is nowadays the newly-published Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology edited by С. Т. Onions.
Quite popular is the famous Etymological English Dictionary by W. W. Skeat compiled at the beginning of the century and published many times.
Ideographic dictionaries designed for English-speaking writers, orators or translators seeking to express their ideas adequately contain words grouped by the concepts expressed.
The world famous ideographic dictionary of English is P. M. Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases.
Besides the most important and widely used types of English dictionaries discussed above there are some others, of which no account can be taken in a brief treatment like this (such as synonym-books, spelling reference books, hard-words dictionaries, etc.).
SOME BASIC PROBLEMS OF DICTIONARY-COMPILING
To get maximum efficiency from dictionaries, to secure all the information afforded by them it is useful to have an insight into the experience of lexicographers and some of the main problems underlying their work.
The work at a dictionary consists of the following main stages: the collection of material, the selection of entries and their arrangement, the setting of each entry.
At different stages of his work the lexicographer is confronted with different problems. Some of these refer to any type of dictionary, others are specific of only some or even one type. The most important of the former are 1) the selection of lexical units for inclusion, 2) their arrangement, 3) the setting of the entries, 4) the selection and arrangement (grouping) of word-meanings, 5) the definition of meanings, 6) illustrative material, 7) supplementary material.
| § 6. The Selection of Lexical Units for Inclusion
|
It would be a mistake to think that there are big academic dictionaries that list everything and that the shorter variants are mere quantitative reductions from their basis. In reality only a dictionary of a dead language or a certain historical period of a living language or a word-book presenting the language of some author (called concordance) can be complete as
216
far as the repertory of the lexical units recorded in the preserved texts goes. As to living languages with new texts constantly coming into existence, with an endless number of spoken utterances, no dictionary of reasonable size could possibly register all occasional applications of a lexical unit, nor is it possible to present all really occurring lexical items. There is, for instance, no possibility of recording all the technical terms because they are too numerous and their number increases practically every day (chemical terminology alone is said to consist of more than 400,000 terms). Therefore selection is obviously necessary for all dictionaries.
The choice of lexical units for inclusion in the prospective dictionary is one of the first problems the lexicographer faces.
First of all the type of lexical units to be chosen for inclusion is to be decided upon. Then the number of items to be recorded must be determined. Then there is the basic problem of what to select and what to leave out in the dictionary. Which form of the language, spoken or written or both, is the dictionary to reflect? Should the dictionary contain obsolete and archaic units, technical terms, dialectisms, colloquialisms, and so forth?
There is no general reply to any of these questions. The choice among the different possible answers depends upon the type to which the dictionary will belong, the aim the compilers pursue, the prospective user of the dictionary, its size, the linguistic conceptions of the dictionary-makers and some other considerations.
Explanatory and translation dictionaries usually record words and phraseological units, some of them also include affixes as separate entries. Synonym-books, pronouncing, etymological dictionaries and some others deal only with words. Frequency dictionaries differ in the type of units included. Most of them enter graphic units, thus failing to discriminate between homographs (such as back n,back adv, back v) and listing inflected forms of the same words (such as go, gone, going, goes) as separate items; others enter words in accordance with the usual lexicographic practice; still others record morphemes or collocations.
The number of entries is usually reduced at the expense of some definite strata of the vocabulary, such as dialectisms, jargonisms, technical terms, foreign words and the less frequently used words (archaisms, obsolete words, etc.).
The policy settled on depends to a great extent on the aim of the dictionary. As to general explanatory dictionaries, for example, diachronic and synchronic word-books differ greatly in their approach to the problem. Since the former are concerned with furnishing an account of the historical development of lexical units, such dictionaries as NED and SOD embrace not only the vocabulary of oral and written English of the present day, together with such technical and scientific words as are most frequently met with, but also a considerable proportion of obsolete, archaic, and dialectal words and uses. Synchronic explanatory dictionaries include mainly common words in ordinary present-day use with only some more important archaic and technical words. Naturally the bigger the dictionary, the larger is the measure of peripheral words,
217
the greater the number of words that are so infrequently used as to be mere museum pieces.
In accordance with the compiler’s aim the units for inclusion are drawn either from other dictionaries or from some reading matter or from the spoken discourse. For example, the corpus from which the word frequencies are derived may be composed of different types of textual material: books of fiction, scientific and technical literature, newspapers and magazines, school textbooks, personal or business letters, interviews, telephone conversations, etc.
Because of the difference between spoken and written language it is to be remembered in dealing with word-books based on printed or written matter that they tend to undervalue the items used more frequently in oral speech and to overweight the purely literary items.
| § 7. Arrangement of Entries |
The order of arrangement of the entries to be included is different in different types of dictionaries and even in the word-books of the same type. In most dictionaries of various types entries are given in a single alphabetical listing. In many others the units entered are arranged in nests, based on this or that principle.
In some explanatory and translation dictionaries, for example, entries are grouped in families of words of the same root. In this case the basic units are given as main entries that appear in alphabetical order while the derivatives and the phrases which the word enters are given either as subentries or in the same entry, as run-ons that are also alphabetised. The difference between subentries and run-ons is that the former do include definitions and usage labels, whereas run-on words are not defined as meaning is clear from the main entry (most often because they are built after productive patterns).
Compare, for example, how the words despicable and despicably are entered in the two dictionaries:
COD despicable, a. Vile, contemptible Hence — LY2 adv.
WNWD despicable adj. that is or should be despised; contemptible. despicably adv. in a despicable manner
In synonym-books words are arranged in synonymic sets and its dominant member serves as the head-word of the entry.
In some phraseological dictionaries, e.g. in prof. Koonin’s dictionary, the phrases are arranged in accordance with their pivotal words which are defined as constant non-interchangeable elements of phrases.
A variation of the cluster-type arrangement can be found in the few frequency dictionaries in which the items included are not arranged alphabetically. In such dictionaries the entries follow each other in the descending order of their frequency, items of the same frequency value grouped together.
Each of the two modes of presentation, the alphabetical and the cluster-type, has its own advantages. The former provides for an easy finding of any word and establishing its meaning, frequency value, etc. The latter requires less space and presents a clearer picture of the
218
relations of each unit under consideration with some other units in the language system, since words of the same root, the same denotational meaning or close in their frequency value are grouped together.
Practically, however, most dictionaries are a combination of the two orders of arrangement. In most explanatory and translation dictionaries the main entries, both simple words and derivatives, appear in alphabetical order, with this or that measure of run-ons, thrown out of alphabetical order.
If the order of arrangement is not strictly alphabetical in synonym-books and phraseological dictionaries, very often an alphabetical index is supplied to ensure easy handling of the dictionary.
Some frequency dictionaries, among them nearly all those constructed in our country, contain two parts with both types of lists.
| § 8. Selection and Arrangement of Meanings |
One of the most difficult problems nearly ‘ all lexicographers face is recording the word-meanings and arranging them in the
most rational way, in the order that is supposed to be of most help to those who will use the dictionary.
If one compares the general number of meanings of a word in different dictionaries even those of the same type, one will easily see that their number varies considerably.
Compare, for example, the number and choice of meanings in the entries for arrive taken from COD and WCD given below1. As we see, COD records only the meanings current at the present moment, whereas WCD also lists those that are now obsolete.
The number of meanings a word is given and their choice in this or that dictionary depend, mainly, on two factors: 1) on what aim the compilers set themselves and 2) what decisions they make concerning the extent to which obsolete, archaic, dialectal or highly specialised meanings should be recorded, how the problem of polysemy and homonymy is solved, how cases of conversion are treated, how the segmentation of different meanings of a polysemantic word is made, etc.
It is natural, for example, that diachronic dictionaries list many more meanings than synchronic dictionaries of current English, as they record not only the meanings in present-day use, but also those that have already become archaic or gone out of use. Thus SOD lists eight meanings of the word arrive (two of which are now obsolete and two are archaic), while COD gives five.
Students sometimes think that if the meaning is placed first in the entry, it must be the most important, the most frequent in present-day use. This is not always the case. It depends on the plan followed by the compilers.
There are at least three different ways in which the word meanings are arranged: in the sequence of their historical development (called historical order), in conformity with frequency of use that is with the most common meaning first (empirical or actual order), and in their logical connection (logical order).
Дата добавления: 2019-01-14; просмотров: 355; Мы поможем в написании вашей работы! |
Мы поможем в написании ваших работ!