Speficity of the subjects: lexicography and contrastive Linguistics

Historical development of English lexicography

• 1721 – “Universal Etymological Dictionary”
• first etymological dictionary, explained etymology of words and included pronunciation (Nathaniel Bailey)

Historical development of English lexicography

• 1775 – explanatory dictionary by Dr Samuel Johnson
• words were illustrated by examples from English literature
• pronunciation was not included
• helped to preserve the English spelling in its conservative form

Historical development of English lexicography

• 1780 – first pronouncing dictionary (Thomas Sheridan)
• 1791 – “The Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language” (John Walker)

Historical development of English lexicography

• – New English Dictionary (NED), 12 volumes, included all words existing in the language
• 1933 – Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 13 volumes
• includes spellings, pronunciations, detailed etymologies, quotations

Historical development of English lexicography

• “A Shorter Oxford Dictionary”, 2 volumes, smaller number of quotations
• 1911 – “The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English”, contained only word of current usage, no quotations

Historical development of English lexicography

• “English Dialect Dictionary” by Joseph Wright

Historical development of American lexicography

• 1798 – “A School Dictionary” (Samuel Johnson Jr.)
• 1828 – “American Dictionary of the English Language” (Noah Webster)
• attempts to simplify the spelling and pronunciation
• provides definitions, etymology, explanations about things named

Historical development of American lexicography

• “Century Dictionary”
• 1895 – “Funk and Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary”
• 1967 – “Random House Dictionary of the English Language”

Main Problems of Lexicography

• number of dictionary entries
• selection of head words
• arrangement and contents of the vocabulary entry
• definitions in a unilingual dictionary

• 17 Number of dictionary entries and selection of head words
• phraseological units (e.g. It is the early bird that catches the worm, at length)
• homonyms (e.g. to work – work)
• occasional or nonce words (e.g. footballer)

• Arrangement of the vocabulary entry
• sequence of meanings of a polysemantic word

• Contents of the vocabulary entries
• distribution of a word: part of speech, grammatical peculiarities, syntactical distribution
• stylistical reference and emotive colouring