English Lexicography

Lexicography (from Greek roots lexicos – ‘referring to words’ and grapho – ‘to write’) is the theory and practice of compiling dictionaries. It has a common object of study with lexicology as both describe the vocabulary of a language. The difference is in the degree of systematization and comprehension of description. Lexicology studies the vocabulary of a language in general, it distinguishes characteristic features of words, and lexicography studies a separate word, it describes its semantic, formal and functional properties.

Dictionaries are reference book consisting of a collection of words arranged in alphabetical, thematic or some other definite order, covering the vocabulary of a language or its part with explanation.

Dictionaries may be classified under different heads.

According to the choice of items included and the sort of information given about these items dictionaries may be divided into two big groups – encyclopedic and linguistic.

Encyclopaedic dictionaries describe different objects, phenomena, people, some branch of knowledge and give some data about them, with articles in alphabetical order, e.g. the Encyclopedia Britannica, Американа: Americana English-Russian Encyclopedic Dictionary под редакцией профессора Г.В. Чернова, Wikipedia,Crystal D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Лингвистический энциклопедический словарь (под ред. В.Н. Ярцевой).

A specific set of encyclopedias is made up by culture studies dictionaries where one can learn facts about people, places, history of the country, e.g. Великобритания: лингвострановедческий словарь (под ред. Рума А.Р.), Томахин Г.Д. Реалии-американизмы, Австралия и Новая Зеландия. Лингвострановедческий словарь под ред. В.В. Ощепковой, Леонтович О.А., Шейгал Е.И. Жизнь и культура США: Лингвострановедческий словарь, The Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture, American quilt.

Linguistic dictionaries are word books the subject-matter of which is lexical units and their linguistic properties such as pronunciation, meaning, origin, their usage and other linguistic information.

In the English language dictionaries, which deal with words, are known by alternate names. They are known as dictionary, lexicon, activator, vocabulary, glossary, concordance and thesaurus.

Dictionary is a full collection of words of the whole dialect, language or field of knowledge.

Lexicon is an obsolete name for a dictionary of the words of a language. It is generally used either for dictionaries of ancient languages viz., Greek, Latin, Arabic or Hebrew, of for dictionaries arranged according to a certain principle, e.g. the Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English.

Now in the meaning of dictionary the word activator is used,the encyclopedic approach is often being employed.

Vocabulary means:

1) the stock of words used by or known to a particular person or group of persons, e.g. active vocabulary, passive vocabulary;

2) a list or collection of words and phrases, usually arranged in alphabetical order and defined or not, e.g. Study the vocabulary of Unit 1;

3) the total number of words that make up a language, e.g. the English vocabulary.

Glossary is 1) a collection of words peculiar to a field of knowledge, with accompanying definitions, e.g. Glossary of Business Terms; Glossary of Computer Terms; 2) a list at the back of a book of difficult and unusual words and expressions (with explanations of their meanings) used in the text, e.g. glossary to the book “The Lay of Igor’s Warfare” («Слово о полку Игореве»).

Concordance is an alphabetical index of the words in a book or in the works of an author with their contexts, e.g. The Concordance of the Bible, The Concordance to Shakespeare.

Thesaurus (from the Greek thēsaurós ‘treasury’) is a book of words (synonyms, antonyms, associated and related words) that are put in groups together according to connections between their meaning and common topic (rather than in alphabetical order), i.e. an ideographic dictionary. A thesaurus is different from an ordinary dictionary: whereas a dictionary aims at explaining the meaning of words and expressions, a thesaurus suggests a range of words and phrases associated with an idea. The world famous ideographic dictionary of English is P. M. Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (first published in 1852, reprinted more than 80 times).

The book is meant only for readers having a good knowledge of English, employed in literary work, speakers and translators into English. The aim of “Roget’s Thesaurus …” is to enable them to pick up an adequate expression for a thought and avoid overuse of the same words.

P. Roget starts his work with segmenting the conceptual field of the English language into six larger classes: 1. Abstract relations, 2. Space, 3. Matter, 4. Intellect, 5. Volition, 6. Affections. These classes are divided into sections, e.g. the class “Abstract relations” includes sections 1. Existence, 2. Relation, 3. Quantity, 4. Order, 5. Number, 6. Time, 7. Change, 8. Causation. Sections in their turn fall into a number groups, e.g. “Existеnce” has subkinds 1. Abstract, 2. Concrete, 3. Formal, 4. Modal. Every group includes indexed subgroups. These subgroups (which are 1000 of number), are designated by words of broad semantics, which allows to group a set of conceptually close words under one label. The principle of word arrangement in final groups can be called a structural-semantic one. Nouns come first, verbs come second, adjectives and adverbs follow them. Words of the same part of speech are arranged according to proximity of their meanings (cf. Appendix).

Major drawbacks of the ideographic dictionary by P. Roget are as follows. Firstly, the nomenclature of the basic classes of concepts is far from being convincing. Why does space make a separate class and time enter abstract relations and the like? Secondly, natural connections of words with other words are often sacrificed to abstract consistency.

Thus, the words referring the concept “Death” enter the group “Vitality” of the section “Organic Matter”, the class “Matter”. So, arrangement of words in the articles seems to be rather arbitrary as well as the classification itself. One can find the word he needs only with the help of the word index in the end of the book.