Lecture 9 english lexicography

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1. Lexicography as a branch of linguistics, its aims and significance.

2. The history of dictionary making.

3. Classification of dictionaries.

4. Main types of linguistic dictionaries of the English language.

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1. Lexicography as a branch of linguistics, its aims and significance

Lexicography is a branch of applied linguistics dealing with the theory and practice of compiling dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary defines lexicography as the writing or compiling of a lexicon or dictionary; the art or practice of writing dictionaries. Lexicon (or vocabulary, word-stock – словарный состав языка) is the total number of words that make up a language.

Lexicology and lexicography are closely connected. They have the same object of investigation – vocabulary (its form, meaning, usage, origin).

The two main problems of lexicography are: that of the number of the words, and that of the list of words to be included in a dictionary. As for the number of words there exist dictionaries of different volumes, e.g. pocket dictionaries with 25 or less thousand words. Among the largest dictionaries there is Webster’s dictionary, it includes about 600,000 words.

The volume of the dictionary and the list of the words depend on the type of dictionary and its aim. Hornsby’s student dictionary includes about 100,000 words, among which there are no words used by W. Shakespeare.

On the contrary the Old English Dictionary includes words, used by W. Shakespeare for specialist.

2. The history of dictionary making

The beginnings of dictionary history are concerned with the international language of medieval European civilization – Latin. The next stage of development, attained in England around 1400, was the collection of the isolated glosses into what is called a glossary, a kind of early Latin-English dictionaries. Glossary is a list or dictionary of special terms of a particular field of study or area of usage, with definitions, e.g. Glossary of Business Terms, Glossary of Computer Terms.

The rapid development of international trade led to an immediate demand for foreign-language dictionaries. There appeared Cooper’s Thesaurus (1565), Florio’s Italian-English dictionary (1599), and Cokeram’s The English Dictionary (1623).

In the 17^th century, with printing well established, the first real English dictionary of importance appeared. It was John Kersey who was the first to attempt a universal dictionary of the language. The most successful of all early dictionaries was A Dictionary of Modern English Language written by Dr. Samuel Johnson (1755). The work was tremendous. Johnson had compiled his dictionary in 8 years. He wrote the definitions of 41,000 words illustrating their meanings with 114,000 quotations.

The greatest of all dictionaries, the New English Dictionary (NED) in 12 volumes, covered 450,000 words and printed 1,800,000 quotations. The NED’s first volume appeared in 1884, the last in 1928. In 1933 the dictionary was republished under the title The Oxford English Dictionary and contained 13 volumes.

The work that makes American lexicography important is Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language in two volumes, the predecessor of all modern American dictionaries. Noah Webster is the most famous of all American dictionary-makers.