These problems often arise from a lack of knowledge of dictionary types and their uses, a factor which is widespread even among language teachers. These factors can lead our students to rely on dictionaries they find at home, whether mono- or bilingual, which are hopelessly out of date, and which lead them to use general language meanings in specialised contexts, often with highly amusing results. They also tend to have a "fixist" attitude to the meaning of words, which causes them to forget or ignore the evolution of language. General users are invariably unaware as to how dictionaries are put together and what audiences they address. Unfortunately, however, in both general and metalexicographical terms, there can be hidden problems. The "a" category is, however, divided into two as we have both monolingual dictionaries, as in my examples, and bi- or multilingual dictionaries, such as the Roberts and Collins Senior (RCS).ħThe extremely broad definition of the OALD leaves much unsaid, but as we all "know" what a dictionary looks like, this is generally not considered a problem. The OED and OALD both fall into the "a" category as they seek to explain the meanings of words, whilst the ODBMD is clearly a member of the "b" category. (OALD)ĦIn fact the OALD gives us three definitions. ( b) a similar book that explains the terms of a particular subject. ( a) a book that gives the words of a language in alphabetical order and explains their meaning or translates them into another language. According to the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary (OALD), a dictionary is: The only exceptions to this alphabetical rule in our daily usage tend to be the onomasiologically organised thesauri, such as Roget's thesaurus.ĥThe wide variety of dictionary types means that it is far from easy to define the concept precisely, although we all know what we “mean” by dictionary and can recognise one when we see one. This semasiological presentation may not be the best, but it is what we have come to expect of a dictionary. The first is a classic language dictionary, the second is more encyclopædic in nature and concerned with terminology what they have in common is a tendency to present words as discrete items in alphabetical order. “ Dictionary” is indeed a polysemous word covering works as different as historical dictionaries, such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and highly encyclopaedic works as the Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ODBMB). The Dictionary: A tool with many facesĤDictionaries come in many forms, and serve a wide variety of purposes in addition to that of teaching. The contextual approach is now transforming even terminology as, in such real life usage, conceptual rigidity no longer holds.ģThe aim of this paper is to trace the changes in dictionary design that corpus linguistics has brought about and to show how approaches initially developed for general language reference dictionaries must be adapted to specialised usage if we are to help users transfer their meanings into words on the page. This has created a revolution in both mono~ and bilingual dictionaries. Corpus linguistics meant analysis of words in context to demonstrate use in context, which entailed changing the dictionary format so as to enable the transfer of this contextual knowledge back to the user. For the user, the challenge is to transfer meaning from the dictionary to the text, and in writing from the dictionary to a new context.ĢA revolution in dictionary making came with the development of corpus linguistics, built on the contextualist view of meaning, and its transfer to lexicographical practice through the COBUILD dictionaries. For the lexicographer meaning must be transferred from context to the dictionary entry using a metalanguage that is sufficiently clear to the user. Meaning thus represents a challenge to both the lexicographer and the dictionary user. This poses a major problem in dictionary writing as an entry is always out of context. The contextualist school of thought that derives from Firth (1890-1960) puts flesh onto the notion of arbitrariness in declaring that the meaning of a word can only be fully appreciated in context, the context is primordial. This may seem obvious, and is the basis of the Saussurean notion of the arbitraire du signe, but it is often far from our everyday attitude to language. 1Words do not have meanings, meanings have words.
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