The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography

by Atkins, B. T. Sue; Rundell, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780199277711
• ISBN10: 0199277710
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-08-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This is a down-to-earth, 'how to do it' textbook on the making of dictionaries. Written by professional lexicographers with over seventy years' experience between them, the book presents a step-by-step course for the training of lexicographers in all settings, including publishing houses, colleges, and universities world-wide, and for the teaching of lexicography as an academic discipline. It takes readers through the processes of designing, collecting, and annotating a corpus of texts; shows how to analyse the data in order to extract the relevant information; and demonstrates how these findings are drawn together in the semantic, grammatical, and pedagogic components that make up an entry. The authors explain the relevance and application of recent linguistic theories, such as prototype theory and frame semantics, and describe the role of software in the manipulation of data and the compilation of entries. They provide practical exercises at every stage. The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography draws on materials developed by the authors over more than twenty years of teaching courses for publishing houses and universities in the US, Japan, Hong Kong and China, South Africa, Australia, the UK, and Europe. It will be welcomed everywhere by lexicographers, teachers of lexicography, and their students. It is also fascinating reading for all those interested in discovering how dictionaries are made.

Author Biography

Sue Atkins has worked as a lexicographer since 1966. She was General Editor of the first Collins-Robert English-French Dictionary series, co-designer of the Cobuild project and Lexicographic Adviser to Oxford University Press. She is currently Adviser to the FrameNet Project at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, California.
Michael Rundell has worked as a lexicographer since 1980. As Managing Editor at Longman Dictionaries for over ten years, he was responsible for running major projects. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Macmillan family of learners' dictionaries. His books include the Wisden Dictionary of Cricket.
Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell are two of the most experienced and respected teachers in their field. With their colleague Adam Kilgarriff, they make up the Lexicography MasterClass (www.lexmasterclass.com), providing consultancy services and running training workshops in lexicography and lexical computing.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. viii
Abbreviations and symbols	p. x
Introduction	p. 1
What this book is about	p. 1
What lexicographers do	p. 2
How this book works	p. 5
And finally ...	p. 8
Pre-lexicography
Introduction to Part I	p. 15
Dictionary types and dictionary users	p. 17
The birth of a dictionary	p. 18
Types of dictionary	p. 24
Types of dictionary user	p. 27
Tailoring the entry to the user who needs it	p. 35
Lexicographic evidence	p. 45
What makes a dictionary 'reliable'?	p. 45
Citations	p. 48
Corpora: introductory remarks	p. 53
Corpora: design issues	p. 57
Collecting corpus data	p. 76
Processing and annotating the data	p. 84
Corpus creation: concluding remarks	p. 93
Methods and resources	p. 97
Preliminaries	p. 97
The dictionary-writing process	p. 97
Software	p. 103
The Style Guide	p. 117
Template entries	p. 123
Linguistic theory meets lexicography	p. 130
Preliminaries	p. 130
Sense relationships: similarities	p. 132
Sense relationships: differences	p. 141
Frame semantics	p. 144
Lexicographic relevance	p. 150
Planning the dictionary	p. 160
Preliminaries	p. 160
Types of lexical item	p. 163
The constituent parts of a dictionary	p. 176
Building the headword list	p. 178
Organizing the headword list	p. 190
Types of entry	p. 193
Planning the entry	p. 200
Preliminaries	p. 200
Information in the various entry components	p. 202
Entry structure	p. 246
Analysing the data
Introduction to Part II	p. 261
Building the database (1): word senses	p. 263
Preliminaries	p. 263
Finding word senses: the nature of the task	p. 269
The contribution of linguistic theory	p. 275
Word senses and corpus patterns: context disambiguates	p. 294
Practical strategies for successful WSD	p. 296
Conclusions	p. 309
Building the database (2): the lexical unit	p. 317
The entry	p. 318
Data	p. 322
Using template entries in database building	p. 379
Compiling the entry
Introduction to Part III	p. 383
Building the monolingual entry	p. 385
Preliminaries: resources for entry-building	p. 386
Distributing information: MWEs, run-ons, and senses	p. 394
Systems for handling grammar and labelling	p. 399
Definitions: introduction	p. 405
Definitions: content	p. 413
Definitions: form	p. 431
What makes a good definition?	p. 450
Examples	p. 452
Completing the entry	p. 462
The translation stage	p. 465
Transfer: translating the database	p. 465
Equivalence factors	p. 467
Finding equivalents	p. 473
Putting translations into the database	p. 479
Building the bilingual entry	p. 484
Resources for entry-building	p. 486
Distributing information throughout the entry	p. 490
Writing the entry	p. 499
Bibliography	p. 515
Index	p. 531
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