- •Institute of foreign philology
- •Theme: Lexicography of the usa and Great Britain
- •Contents
- •Introduction
- •Lexicology and lexicography. Main problems of lexicography Lexicology and Lexicography
- •Problems of lexicography
- •The history of American lexicography
- •The history of British lexicography
- •4. Classification of dictionaries
- •4.1. Notion of dictionary. Functions, types, components.
- •4.2. Common used dictionaries
- •Conclusion
- •References
4.2. Common used dictionaries
English is famous for its unpredictable spellings and a dictionary is obviously going to be very useful here. A dictionary will tell you whether this spelling is British or American. You can even find out whether a verb has an irregular past tense or whether an adjective has an irregular comparative form.
The phonetic alphabet is used in dictionaries to tell you about the pronunciation of a word, and a special indication will help you get the stress in the right place.
List of major English dictionaries:
The Penguin English Dictionary
Webster's New World Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary (descriptive)
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
All types of dictionaries, save the translation ones, may be mоnolingual or bilingual, i.e. the information about the items entered may be given in the same language or in another one.
Care should be taken not to mix up the terms monolingual and explanatory, on the one hand, and bilingual and translation dictionaries on the other. The two pairs of terms reflect different dimensions of dictionaries. The terms monolingual and bilingual* pertain to the language in which the information about the words dealt with is couched. The terms explanatory and translation dictionaries characterise the kind of information itself.[4; 211]
Conclusion
It is important to study over all types of dictionaries in order to master even your native language. It plays the most leading role in studying a language. But theres such a problem as what kind of a dictionary we must choose to improve our speech skills day by day.
Dictionaries are used not only by linguists and scientists, but also by ordinary people of all ages. The science which studies dictionaries and their making is called lexicography.
High importance of dictionaries in people’s life and their widespread use outlined the topic of my report: Lexicography as a science.
Lexicography as a science comprises two related disciplines. They are: practical lexicology and theoretical lexicology.
Theoretical lexicography is the scholarly discipline of analyzing and describing the semantic relationships within the lexicon (vocabulary) of a language and developing theories of dictionary components and structures linking the data in dictionaries.
Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries.
A person devoted to lexicography is called a lexicographer, famously defined in Samuel Johnsons Dictionary of the English Language (1755) as "A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words".
General lexicography focuses on the design, compilation, use and evaluation of general dictionaries, i.e. dictionaries that provide a description of the language in general use. Such a dictionary is usually called a general dictionary or LGP dictionary. Specialized lexicography focuses on the design, compilation, use and evaluation of specialized dictionaries, i.e. dictionaries that are devoted to a (relatively restricted) set of linguistic and factual elements of one or more specialist subject fields, e.g. legal lexicography.