Dictionaries, Apuntes de Idioma Inglés

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UNIT 2: DICTIONARIES

INTRODUCTION

Dictionaries are not fixed + authoritative sources of information:  there is no such thing as the dictionary  dictionaries are competitive commercial products  many types: e.g. monolingual vs bilingual, terminology dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopaedias, lexical databases Differences include:  overall organisation ► macro-structure  relations among lexical entries, typically cross-reference to synonyms, antonyms etc. or reference to external materials describing the word usage ► meso-structure  structure of individual lexical entries (e.g. lexical information provided + the way the information is organized ►micro-structure

macrostructure

microstructure

MACRO-STRUCTURE

 Table of contents ► list of the main contents  Preface ► information about dictionary’s purpose, users, data used to compile it, modifications of earlier editions, etc.  Instructions ► explanation of the macrostructure, selection of words (lemmas), and microstructure of entries  Grammatical Information ► this may be a ‘mini’ (usu. called a dictionary grammar)  Appendices ► Transliteration tables (usu. in plurilingual dictionaries dealing with languages with different alphabets such as Chinese vs English, Arabic etc.), Conversion Tables (e.g. units of measure), Abbreviations (adj., cont.), Symbols (☞ ‘see’, ♀ ‘female’)  Bibliography ► If the data that the dictionary is based on are a corpus of published texts, then the bibliography is divided into two subsections: 1 ) primary sources [i.e. the corpus], 2 ) specialized literature  Other Components

MICRO-STRUCTURE

the internal structure of dictionary’s entries ► entries start with headwords , entry-words, citation forms, lemmas  Lemma : the particular form conventionally chosen by convention to represent a set of possible with the same general meaning  Lexeme : minimal meaningful unit to which morphemes are added Example: lemma: run ► lexemes: run, ran and running BUT sometimes a word-form may belong to different lexemes (race) ► different dictionary entries Microstructure: the different parts that describe one lemma in an dictionary entry

Microstructure of dictionary entry includes:  pronunciation  grammar (category, gender, number)  definition / interlinguistic equivalent(s) (if bi- or plurilingual dictionary)  etymology  example(s): words in context  idiomatic phrases and collocations  synonyms, dialectal/regional variants, antonyms  technical senses  encyclopedic information dictionaries organize data according to various formats

expanded microstructure (entryword + microstructure starting below)

Illustrated entries

Word in use, idioms, collocations