5. Lexicography, its subject-matter and tasks

Lexicography, the science, of dictionary-compiling, is closely connected with lexicology, both dealing with the same problems — the form, meaning, usage and origin of vocabulary units — and making use of each other’s achievements.

Lexicography studies some basic problems of linguistics such as – selection of lex.untis for inclusion to a dictionary, arrangement of these lex.units, selection and arrangement and definition of meanings and other.

5. The nature of a dictionary

The term dictionary is used to denote a book listing words of a language with their meanings and often with data regarding pronunciation, usage and/or origin. Nowadays the various electronic dictionaries are created. Dictionaries have rather later an origin. They belong to the middle of 15 century. In previous centuries people made glossaries; it were the handwritten lists of foreign and unusual words which it was necessary to face in manuscripts in classic languages, especially compositions of the Greek and Latin classics.

5. Types of dictionaries. Special dictionaries. Learner’s dictionaries

There are a lot of different types of English dictionaries. They may be roughly divided into two groups: encyclopediac and linguistic. Linguistic is a book of words in a language, usually listed alphabetically, with definitions, pronounciations, etymologies and other linguistic information or with thier equivalents in another language.Types: General dictionaries (contain lexical units in ordinary use)

Restricted dictionaries (terminological, phraseological, dialectical, dictionaries of new words, of foreign words, of abbreviations). Monolingual, Bilingual. Explanatory, Translation.

Special Dictionaries: The special dictionaries may be classed into the following groups on the basis of the nature of their word lists:- (1) Their covering special geographical regions, social dialects or special spheres of human activity, (2) Their formal shape, (3) Their semantic aspect and their relational value in the lexical stock of the language (4) Their collocational value, (5) Special language units and others.

The first group includes the dictionaries of the following: (a), dialects, (b) technical terms - glossaries (c) special professions, arts and crafts etc., (d) slangs, jargons and argot etc.

2. Special dictionaries classified on the basis of the formal aspects of the lexical units are of the following types: (a) Spelling or orthographical dictionaries, (b) Pronouncing dictionaries, (c) Word formation dictionaries (including dictionaries of roots, verbs etc.), (d) Dictionaries of homonyms, (e) Dictionaries of paronyms, (f) Grammatical dictionaries, (g) Reverse dictionaries (h) Dictionaries of abbreviations, acronyms etc.

The term learner’s dictionary is confined to dictionaries specially compiled to meet the demands of the learners for whom English is not their mother tongue. They must include only the essential information, which must be easy to fin and understand, the great attention must be given to the functioning of lexical units in speech. Learner’s dictionaries may be classified in accordance the volume of the word-list and thus they fall into two groups. 1. Contain all lexical units (Hornby’s Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (50,000 lexical units) and M. West’s International Reader’s Dictionary (about 24,000 units)) 2. only the most essential and important words(A Grammar of English Words by H. Palmer (1,000 words), and The English-Russian Learner’s Dictionary by S. K. Folomkina and H. M. Weiser (3,500 units))