Topics for presentations

· Ebonics (Бабич Г.Н. стр. 158-160)

· Australian English (Бабич Г.Н. стр. 164-166)

· A “posh” accent

Seminar 14. English Lexicography

Lexicography as a branch of linguistics, its aims and significance. Classification and types of dictionaries: encyclopaedic and linguistic dictionaries. General (dictionaries of word-frequency, rhyming, explanatory, bilingual, pronouncing, spelling, etc.) and restricted (phraseological, terminological, new words, dialectal dictionaries, etc.); explanatory and specialized; monoligual, bilingual and multilingual; diachronic (historical, etymological) and synchronic (descriptive); for the general public and learner’s dictionaries; book form and electronic (CD, on-line) dictionaries. Types of special dictionaries: ones of synonyms, antonyms, collocations, slang, usage, pronouncing, ideographic, etc.

Some of the main debatable problems in lexicograthy. Typical dictionary structure. Historical development of British and American lexicography. Modern trends in English lexicography. Corpus-based lexicography. Computational lexicography.

Test Questions

1. What are the various alternative names used for a dictionary?

2. What types of linguistic dictionaries are there according to: the target reader; the choice of lexical units to be included in the word list; the type of information suggested in the entry; the language used in the right-hand part of the entry; time; word-structure; combinability; semantic ties; sphere of usage; similarity of meaning; polarity of meaning; value of occurrence; medium / carrier / form?

3. How do the subject (restricted) dictionaries differ from general dictionaries?

4. What information is covered by the special dictionaries?

5. What are the postulates of learner’s lexicography?

6. What makes regular reversibility in bilingual dictionaries impossible?

7. What are the main problems of lexicography?

8. What is the history of English lexicography?

9. How would you differentiate between prescriptive and descriptive dictionaries?

10. What are the essential features of a new generation of ‘computer-corpus based’ dictionaries? What are the advantages of archives of speech events called corpora in dictionary making?