This book deals with the problem of foreign language lexicography. It
is concerned with the lack of adequacy between, on the one hand,
current reference works and, on the other, the learners' needs. These
needs have been insufficiently investigated and this book suggests
that the lack of substantial results in the area is due to a flawed
research methodology. It is suggested that a qualitative type of
research, instead of a quantitative one, should yield better
results. A sample of this kind of qualitative analysis, carried out on
dictionary examples, bears out that dictionaries would gain with a
separation of the encoding and decoding parts. This had already been
suggested by a few researchers in the past, but only at a theoretical
level. A series of practical consequences of this separation are then
considered and, as a result, recommendations are formulated for the
compiling of dictionaries in the future. These recommendations are
intended mainly to improve the encoding part of the dictionary.
Table of Contents
Introduction 15
CHAPTER 1 Dictionaries, History And Learners' Needs 29
1. The History of Dictionaries 29
2. Learner's Dictionaries 33
3. Bilingual Dictionaries 36
4. Bilingualised Dictionaries 37
5. The Longman Language Activator 38
CHAPTER 2 Review Of Litterature 41
1. Dictionary Use and Users 'Questionnaires and Experiments 41
1. Questionnaires 42
2. Criticism of Questionnaires 43
3. Controlled Experiments 45
4. Atkins and Varantola 46
5. Hilary Nesi's Research on Examples 48
2. Dictionaries and Computers 50
3. The Need for a New Kind of Research 53
CHAPTER 3 Examples: The Core Of Foreign Language Lexicography 55
1. General Considerations 55
1. The Research on Examples 55
2. Types of Examples 58
3. The Function of Examples 61
4. Examples for Decoding and Examples for Encoding 61
2. Examples in Learner's Dictionaries. The Problem of Collocation and
Syntax. 62
1. Classification 62
2. Decoding 63
3. Encoding 65
4. Requirements for examples 69
3. Cobuild and Authentic vs. Made-Up Examples 78
1. The Defence of 'Authentic Language' 79
2. Criticisms of Cobuild and the Authentic Examples Policy 80
3. Corpora 81
4. The Didactic Point of View 81
4. Examples in Bilingual Dictionaries. 84
1. The Examples for Road in Collins Spanish-English 86
2. The Examples for Road in Oxford-Hachette 93
CHAPTER 4 An Integrated Approach To Foreign Language Lexicography 97
1. Decoding 100
1. Morphology and Multi-Word Items 103
2. Idioms and Collocations 104
3. Polysemy 106
4. Including the Context: Two Experiments. 114
2. Encoding 123
1. Introduction 124
2. Encoding for Beginners 124
3. Encoding for Advanced Learners 131
Concluding Remarks 161
Glossary 165
Appendixes 170
Bibliography 189
Lingfield(s): Lexicography, Applied Linguistics
Written In: English (Language Code: ENG)
Pubs-postscript-html
-----------------
Major Supporters ----------------