Old English Lexicology And Lexicography

Essays demonstrating how the careful study of individual words can shed immense light on texts more broadly.

From the contents: Maurizio GOTTI: The origin of 17th century canting terms. - Anne MCDERMOTT: Early dictionaries of English and historical corpora: in search of hard words. - Paivi KOIVISTO-ALANKO: Prototypes in semantic change: a diachronic perspective on abstract nouns. - Manuela ROMANO POZO: A morphodynamic interpretation of synonymy and polysemy in Old English."

This volume comprises essays in lexicography, lexicology and semantics by leading international experts in these fields. The contributions cover Old, Middle and Present-Day English and Scots, and specific subjects include medical vocabulary, colour lexemes, and semantic and pragmatic meaning in terms for politeness, money and humour. In the area of Old English studies there are articles on kinship terminology and colour lexemes, and in Middle English a semantic and syntactic study of the overlapping of the verbs dreden and douten. Many of the essays make use of the Historical Thesaurus of English project at the University of Glasgow, and pay tribute to its Director, Professor Christian Kay; e.g., one article demonstrates how the HTE, a project which is at the interface between historical semantics and lexicography, may present a rich resource for information about the lexicalization of concepts within our culture, such as changing social attitudes in the area of will, consent and coercion. Other resources, such as The Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, and the Oxford English Dictionary provide a rich source for information on historical lexicography, semantics and editing. A number of essays concern the Scots language, such as an analysis of evaluative terms in modern Scots speech and writing, the rich potential of rhyme in Scots, and the role of lexicon in th- fronting in Glaswegian.

Including a selection of papers originally presented at the 10th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, the contributions to this volume aim to show the breadth and depth of late-1990s studies in lexicology, semantics and lexicography.

Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicography is a systematic and accessible introduction to the lexicology of modern English. Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that studies all aspects of the vocabulary of a particular language. The book provides an account of the sources of modern English words and studies the development of vocabulary over time. It examines: What are words? Where do English words come from? How are words made up? How do words 'mean'? How are words used? How can words be investigated? This new edition of the best-selling textbook has been revised and updated throughout. This second edition features: - Updated chapters on dictionaries and corpus linguistics - Summaries of content at the beginning of each chapter - A revised list of suggestions for further reading - A new glossary Words, Meaning and Vocabulary is an essential introduction to lexicology for undergraduate students.

Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest sets out to explore the pioneering endeavours in both lexicography and lexicology which led to the making of the first English dictionary published by Oxford. Deliberately conceived as a new departure in English lexicography, the first OED, as James Murray stressed, was to be founded on an unequivocal return to first principles, both in the nature of its construction and in the evidence amassed for its compilation. It also produced, as this book shows, a host of problems: on the nature of Englishness, correctness, and general standards of language use, as well as in aspects of pronunciation, semantics, and syntax. Often making use of previously unpublished archive material, this collection of twelve essays provides both a range of perspectives from which the dictionary can be approached, and also explores the particular problems posed by the attempt to realize the pioneering acts of lexicography integral to the making of the dictionary.

This work goes back to the sources of modern English words and studies the development of vocabulary over time. It examines what constitutes a word, with a discussion of words that look and sound the same, words that have several meanings, and "words" that are made up of more than one "word". As well as considering the borrowing of words from other languages throughout the history of English as a means of increasing the vocabulary, the book also outlines how English forms new words by exploiting the structure of existing words, through processes of derivation and compounding. The meaning of a word is composite of a number of relations: reference to external context, relations with other words of a similar or opposite meaning, collocational relations, and so on. The book grapples with the meaning problem, but then goes on to look at the contexts in which words are used and the purposes for which they are used, raising the question whether it is more sensible to talk about English "vocabularies" rather than English "vocabulary".

In this book, the development of the English dictionary is examined, along with the kinds of dictionary available, the range of information they contain, factors affecting their usage, and public attitudes towards them. As well as an descriptive analysis of word meaning, the author considers whether a thematic, thesaurus-like presentation might be more suited than the traditional alphabetical format to the description of words and their meaning.