LEXICOGRAPHY

Noor Atiqah binti Rapaiee 0910572Nur Hafizah binti Musa 0825704 Nur Syamimi binti Hambali091983

1. DEFINITION of lexicography

Lexicography

processes involved in the determination of word meaning and the construction of dictionaries

designing domain specific guidelines for dictionary construction

research and gathering of old and new words and the associated quotations

Cont.

etymologies and pronunciationsresearching and writing of definitionsresearching word usagetext encoding and formatting for storage

and publication.

Lexicography is divided into two related disciplines :

a) Practical lexicography The art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries.

b) Theoretical lexicography The scholarly discipline of analyzing and describing the semantic, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships within the lexicon

(vocabulary) of a language.

Developing theories of dictionary components and structures linking the data in dictionaries.

The needs for information by users in specific types of situation.

How users may best access the data incorporated in printed and electronic dictionaries.

This is sometimes referred to as 'metalexicography'.

2. SCOPE OF THE USED OF LEXICOGRAPHY IN LANGUAGE STUDY

Practical lexicographic work involves several activities, and the compilation ofwell crafted dictionaries require careful consideration of some of thefollowing aspect:

• Profiling the intended users• Defining the communicative and cognitive functions of the dictionary• Selecting and organizing the components of the dictionary• Choosing the appropriate structures for presenting the data in the dictionary• Selecting words and affixes for systematization as entries• Selecting collocations, phrases and examples• Choosing lemma forms for each word or part of word to be lemmatized• Defining words and organizing definitions• Specifying pronunciations of words• Labeling definitions and pronunciations for register and dialect• Selecting equivalents in bi- and multilingual dictionaries• Translating collocations, phrases and examples in bi- and multilingual dictionaries• Designing the best way in which users can access the data in printed and

electronic dictionaries

Theoretical lexicography - Concerns the same aspects as lexicography but is meant to lead to

the development of principles that can improve the quality of future dictionaries. Several branches of such academic dictionary research are:

• Dictionary criticism - evaluating the quality of one or more dictionaries

• Dictionary history - tracing the traditions of a type of dictionary in a particular country or language

• Dictionary typology - classifying the various genres of reference works (ex: monolingual versus bilingual dictionary)

• Dictionary structure - formatting the various ways in which the information is presented in a dictionary

• Dictionary use - observing the reference acts and skills of dictionary users

• Dictionary IT - applying computer aids to the process of dictionary compilation

3. Relevance to Language Learning/ Corpus Linguistics

• Printed bilingualised learners’ dictionaries, typically include an L2 definition immediately followed by an L1 translation and provide access to both monolingual and bilingual information.

• The corpora that they use to produce the dictionary: HOW THEY DECIDE? Current, reliable, user friendly, more information,

and relevancy.

4. TYPE OF CORPora USED IN LANGUAGE STUDY

• Corpora are used for the production of dictionaries and grammar books.

• Examples : for dictionaries: Collins Cobuild, British National Corpus (BNC), Longman Corpus Network and Online Dictionaries.

• For Grammar books: COBUILD Corpus of Spoken and Written British, American and Australian English, LOB Corpus of Written British English, Kohlapur Corpus of Written Indian English, London-Lund Corpus of Spoken British English, UTS/Macquarie Corpus of Spoken Australian English.

5. APPLICATION ON LANGUAGE RESEARCH

• Grammar books• Oxford English Dictionary (OED)• BNC (British National Corpus on-line)website,

which in this case includes literary and journalistic texts

6. Other Relevant Information

• Professor Kev Nair is regarded as the father of fluency lexicography. - Fluency lexicography came into existence as a separate branch of dictionary writing

• Lexicography is not merely focusing on English language but also other language as well like Arabic Lexicography and German Lexicography.

• Lexicographer is a linguist whose specific expertise is in writing dictionaries.

• A lexicographer is concerned with what words are, what they mean, how the vocabulary of a language is structured, how speakers of the language use and understand the words, how the words evolved and what relationships exists between words.

7. Conclusion

• Lexicography is divided into two related discipline that is practical lexicography and theoretical lexicography.

• The relevancy of lexicography to language learning and corpus linguistics.

• Lexicography corpora.

• Related studies pertaining to lexicography.

SYNOPSIS

Lexical Profiling Software and its LexicographicApplications – a Case Study

Adam Kilgarriff and Michael Rundellhttp:// www.kilgarriff.co.uk/2002-kilgRundell-

Euralex-Sketches

PROBLEM

TECHNOLOGY• Large corpus & easily access = leads to

information overload • Traditional’ approach analysing data make

unreasonable demands towards human memory.

• Time-consuming• Human editors cannot process such high

volumes of data with any degree of reliability.

SOLUTIONS

1. COBUILD project (early 1980s): a corpus of not much over 7 million words– and often found themselves wanting more2. WORD SKETCHES : aim to improve on existing collocate lists by using POS-tagged and (partially) analysed corpus data to identify the relevant collocates for a range of distinct grammatical relations.

CORPUS

• creating the text for the new Macmillan English Dictionary (MED) : Word Sketches for over 8000 English words

: CORPUS:over 200 million words: EASY & DIFFICULT WORDS : examples: forge (easy) & challenge (difficult)

FINDINGS

1. The Word Sketches not only streamlined the process of searching for significant word combinations, but often provided a more revealing, and more efficient, way of uncovering the key features of a word's behaviour than the (now traditional) method of scanning concordances.

2.For genuinely difficult words – the Word Sketches provided far more than just a rapid summary of collocational preferences.

REFLECTIONS

1. This assignment opens our mind towards something that we never think before on how the dictionary is produced. It is a challenging task actually to enlighten others.

2. Cooperation is very important in doing this assignment & for the overall creation of blog.