Practical Lexicography

This is a state-of-the-art Guide to the fascinating world of the lexicon and its description in various types of dictionaries. A team of experts brings together a solid Introduction to Lexicography and leads you through decision-making processes step-by-step to compile and design dictionaries for general and specific purposes. The domains of lexicography are outlined and its specific terminology is explained in the Glossary. Each chapter provides ample suggestions for further reading. Naturally, electronic dictionaries, corpus analysis, and database management are central themes throughout the book. The book also "introduces" questions about the many types of definition, meaning, sense relations, and stylistics. And that is not all: those afraid to embark on a dictionary adventure will find out all about the pitfalls in the chapters on Design. A Practical Guide to Lexicography introduces and seduces you to learn about the achievements, unexpected possibilities, and challenges of modern-day lexicography.

This is the first book to give a full and readable account of how dictionaries are made. It is both a general introduction to lexicography and a systematic guide to lexicographic methods. Included are sections on treatment of pronunciation, inflection, constructions, collocations, and idioms; the structure of entries and their arrangement in a dictionary; and the planning, execution, and monitoring of a dictionary project. Practical Lexicography demonstrates how both one-language and two-language dictionaries are written, the ways in which materials are selected, arranged, and explained, and how computers have revolutionized the making of dictionaries.

This book collects and introduces some of the best and most useful work in practical lexicography. It has been designed as a resource for students and scholars of lexicography and lexicology and to be an essential reference for professional lexicographers. It focusses on central issues in the field and covers topics hotly debated in lexicography circles. After a full contextual introduction Thierry Fontenelle divides the book into twelve parts - theoretical perspectives, corpus design, lexicographical evidence, word senses and polysemy, collocations and idioms, definitions, examples, grammar and usage, bilingual lexicography, tools and methods, semantic networks, and how dictionaries are used. The book is fully referenced and indexed. The reader may be used independently for reference or as reading material for a course of study. It is an essential companion for The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography by Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell, published by OUP in 2008.

This reader collects some of the best and most useful work in practical lexicography, focusing on the central issues and hottest topics in the field. An essential resource for all students and scholars of lexicography and lexicology as well as professional lexicographers.

This comprehensive introduction by two of the world's leading lexicographers presents a course in dictionary-making for publishers, colleges, and universities world-wide. The book takes readers through building a corpus, analysing the data, and writing entries. Numerous exercises show the use of software to manipulate data and compile entries.

In a linguistic climate that is hyperaware of so-called language death, dictionaries have been touted as stalwarts for language preservation. When wielded by communities undertaking language revitalization, dictionaries can be designed to facilitate reversing language shift and fostering linguistic innovation. Indeed, dictionaries’ reputation as multifunctional reference materials make them adaptable to a wide variety of community needs. Revitalization Lexicography provides a detailed account of creating a dictionary meant to move a once-sleeping language into a language of active daily use. This unique look under the hood of lexicography in a small community highlights the ways in which the dictionary was intentionally leveraged to shape the Tunica language as it inevitably changes throughout revitalization. Tunica, one of the heritage languages of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Marksville, Louisiana, has been undergoing active revitalization since 2010. The current generation of speakers began learning Tunica, a once-sleeping language, through written documentation. Now enough Tunica speakers to confer amongst themselves when questionable language use arises. Marrying both the theoretical and the practical aspects that contributed to the Tunica dictionary, this book discusses complex lexicographic tasks in a manner accessible to both academic and community readers. This work is firmly backdropped in a fieldwork approach that centers the community as owners of all aspects of their revitalization project. This book provides concrete and practical considerations for anyone attempting to create a dictionary. Contrasting examples from Tunica and English dictionaries, this book challenges readers to rethink their relationship to dictionaries in general. A must-read for anyone who has ever touched a dictionary.

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.