Classification of dictionaries

Classification of dictionaries

All d. are divided into linguistic and encyclopedic. E. d. describe different objects, phenomena, people and give some data about them. L. d. describe vocabulary units, their semantic structure, their origin, their usage. Words are usually given in the alphabetical order. Linguistic d. are divided into general and specialized. To general dictionries two most widely used dictionaries belong: explanatory and translation d. Specialized d. include dictionaries of synonyms, antonyms, collocations, word frequency, neologisms, slang, pronouncing, etymological, phraseological and others. All types of dictionaries can be unilingual ( excepting translation ones) if the explanation is given in the same language, bilingual if the explanation is given in another language and also they can be polilingual. There are a lot of explanatory. In e. d. the entry consists of the spelling, transcription, grammatical forms, meanings, examples, phraseology. Translation dictionaries give words and their equivalents in the other language. There are English-Russian dictionaries by I. R. Galperin, by Y. Apresyan. Among general dictionaries we can also mention Learner’s d. They began to appear in the second half of the 20-th century. The most famous is «The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary» by A. S. Hornby. It is a unilingual dictionary based on COD, for advanced foreign learners and language teachers. It gives data about grammatical and lexical valency of words. Phraseological d. describe idioms and colloquial phrases, proverbs. Some of them have examples from literature. In «The Oxford Dicionary of English Proverbs» each proverb is illustrated by a lot of examples. The most famous bilingual dictionary of phraseology was compiled by A. V. Koonin. It is one of the best phraseological dictionaries. Etymological d. trace present-day words to the oldest forms of these words and forms of these words in other languages. One of the best etymological dictionaries was compiled by W. Skeat.

English vocabulary and it's features.

The voc. of Old Eng. was 30000 words. Of Modern Eng. 500. 000 words. Not all these words are equally active in speech. A college student is expected to know 5. 000 frequently used words. These words cover 93% of modern text. Peculiarities: 1. E. is rich in loans. They make up about 70% of the vocab. The reason is colonial, trade, cultural links with other countries. E. is analytical by its nature. A high % of polysemantic words, because monosemantic words are non motivated. E. is rich of common names. (I saw him there - I saw hymn their /homonyms/. E. spelling is concervative, because the reform was in the 15th century, since that time the pronunciation has changed and the spelling remained the same. Three kinds of motivation: 1) sound imitative words (to splash, ping pong, to geegle); 2) structural - derivatives and compound words are structurally motivated (smiler, noder, he is a poor go to sliper); 3) semantic - words with metaphoric and metonymic meaning are semantically motivated (neck /non-motiv. / - the neck of a bottle /motiv. semant. /.

Synonyms - are usually defined as words, different in form, but denoting diferent shades of a common meaning. There are different classifications of synonyms: - absolute synonyms which are very rare. There are mostly different names for one and the same plant, animal, disease, science (compounding-composition, Fatherland- mother country, looking glass - mirror). - ideographic differ from each other in shades of meanings or denote different digrees of a given quality (beautiful-fine-handsome-pretty). Such synonyms are sometimes called relative (to look-gaze-glance-stare-eye-peep). - Stylistic do not differ in shades of their common meaning. They differ in usage and style (valley-vale, evening-eve, silent-mute, open-ope, examination-exam). Among stylistic there are numerous paired synonyms, one of which is native and the other foreign by origin (answer-respond, begin-start). Numerous styl. syn. have been created by shortening (gent-gentleman, lab-laboratory, math-mathematics). - phraseological are those which do not nesessarily differ materially in their meanings or stylistic value. They differ in their combinative power. Sometimes the difference is in meaning: piece, bit, slice, lump and phras. syn. can replace each other in some combinations, but are not interchangeable in others (sick-ill (differefce in usage). - Dialectical pertaining to differ variant of language from dialectical stratification point of view. Used in the definite territory (autumn-fall, queue-line). - Contextual similar in meaning only under some specific distributional conditions, when the difference between the meanings of two words is contextually neutralized (buy-get, tasteless-dull, active-curious, curious- responsive).

Metonymy - is the device in which the name of one thing is changed for that of another to which it is related by association of ideas, as having close relationship to one another. (I had no head for names, I have an ear for music, She’s the hope of the family).

Synecdoche - is the simpliest case of metonymy, which means “giving” the part for the whole (head of cattle).

Metaphor - is a deep semantic transformation of a word going far beyond its primary semantic range. -speech: the door is singing; - language: the foot of the hill, the foot of a man. 1. living: the door is singing, 2. trite (faded): the foot of the hill, 3. dead: hooligan. Zoosemy- used when names of animals are used metaphorically to denote human qualities (he is such a bear, a pig of a friend, a tiger (cruel fellow)). Metaphor forms part of our way of thinking, of understanding the world. At times, it lexicalises (that is, it becomes very common), and we are not aware that we are using a metaphor: Life is not a bed of roses. We base on previous models to produce communicative units, and a transmitter, a receiver and a channel are necessary. Nevertheless, it doesn’t imply that these units are not creative. A metaphor can be defined as an incomplete simile. - She is (as pretty as) a rose. - My friend is (as strong as) an ox. In a metaphor there are two terms: the real one (my friend) and the evoked or imaginary one (ox). There is, then, some similarity between the two terms. If only the evoked term appears, we have a pure metaphor.

Semasiology - the brunch of linguistics concerned with the meaning of words and word equivalents. Lexical meaning is the realization of concept or emotion by means of a definite language system. The grammatical meaning is more abstract and more generalised than the lexical meaning, it unites words into big groups such as parts of speech or lexico-grammatical classes. The conceptual content of a word is expressed in its denotative meaning may be: - significative (if the referent is a concept), - demonstrative (if it is an individual object). Interesting examples of significative meaning may be found in proverbs and so on. The interaction o denotative meaning and its pragmatic counterpart - connotation - is no less complicated than in the case of lexical and grammatical meaning. The denotative meaning exists by virtue of what the word refers to, connotation - is the pragmatic communicative value the word receives by virtue of where, when, how, by whom and in what contexts it is or may be used.

Etymological doublets - two or more words which sound alike, have different meaning but historically go back to one word. (the - that, thorough - throught, of - off, in - inn). 1) native scandinavian: skirt - shirt, scar - share, raid - roud. 2) d. from different languages - direct and indirect borrowings - Latin-French: camera - chamber, wine - vine, capital - chapter; Greek-French: deacon - dean. 3) d. from different periods of one language: ticket - etiquette, servant - sergeant, hostel - hotel, camp - campus. 4) different dialects: canal - channel, task - tax. 5) shortening: defence - fence, master - mister, history - story. 6) triplets: hospital - hostel - hotel.

Lexicology - comes from two Greek words: lexis - word, phrase; logos - a department of knowledge. The object of study is the vocabulary. The totality of words and phrases and their properties lexicology aim at giving a systematic description of the wordstock of modern English. Lexicology falls into general which is concerned with specific features of any language and special which studies a vocabulary of a given language. Contrastive lexicology comparing two or more languages and revealing their similarities and disimilarities. Diachronical (or historical) lexicology - it deals with evolution, changes in the vocabulary in the course of time. Sinchronic lexicology deals with the modern state of lexicology. Phonetics and lexicology. All categories of phonetics may be used for lexicological purpose to differentiate the meaning of words and phrases. Grammar and lexicology. Grammatical categories are often used to change word meanings. (attention, attentions; goos, goods). A lot of new meanings of words are born in stylistics.

Homonyms - in case of homonymy the different meanings of words are mutually independent, there is no connection between such words, they have only the same pronunciation and spelling. (son-sun, bear-bear, ear-ear, meet-meat, piece-peace). The classify: 1) perfect homonyms (or words identical both in pronunciation, spelling but different in meaning): bear-bear. 2) homographs or heteronyms (identical in spelling but different in sound and meaning): row-row. 3) homophones (words identical in sound but different in spelling and meaning): son-sun, pair-pear. 4) homoforms (different in meaning but identical in some of their grammatical forms): found (find) - to found.