COURSE

ASSIGNEMENT

TOPIC:
THE MAIN PROBLEMS OF LEXICOGRAPHY.

Written by: Accepted by:

Elsona Sinanaj Irena Pata

UNIVERSITY OF TIRANA

FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

 What is lexicography?

The ancient greeks were some of the earliest makers of

dictionaries;They used them mainy to catalog absolete terms from
their rich literary past.They attached the suffix ‘graphas’ meaning
dictionary to form lexicographas.The english ancestor of the english
word lexicographer.Lexikon ,which descends from greek ‘lexis’
(meaning word or speech,also gave us lexicon which can mean either
dictionary or vocabulary of a language,speaker or subject.

 DIVISIONS OF LEXICOGRAPHY

I. Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling

,writing,editing dictionaries.
II. Theoretical lexicography is the scholarly discipline of analyzing
and describing the semantic syntagmatic and paradigmatic
relationships within a lexic of a language.
III. Developing theories of dictionary components and structures
linking the data in dictionaries,,the needs for informationby
users in specific types of situations and how users may best
access the data incorporated in printed and electronic
dictionaries .This is referres as metalexicography.
IV. Lexicography focus on the design,compilation use and evolution
of general dictionaries.Dictionaries that provide a description
of the language in general use.(LGP-language for general
dictionary.
V. Specialized lexicography focuses on the design ,compilation,use
and evolution of specialized dictionaries.
 ASPECTS

I. Profiling the inteend users (linguistic and non linguistic

competences)and identifying their needs.
II. Defining the communicative and cognitive functions of the
dictionary.
III. Selecting and organizing the components of the dictionary.
IV. Choosing the appropriate structures for presenting the data in
the dictionary.
V. Selecting words and afixes for systematization as entries.
VI. Selecting cololocations, phrases and examples.
VII. Choosing lemma forms for each word or part of word to be
lemmatized.
VIII. Defining word.
IX. Organizing definitions.
X. Specifying pronunciationof words.
XI. Labelling definitions and pronunciations for register and dialect
where appropriate.
XII. Selecting equivalents in bi- and multi-lingual dictionaries.
XIII. Translating calculations ,phrases,and examples in and
multilingual dictionaries.
XIV. Designing the best way in which users can access the data in
printed and electronic dictionaries.

 MAIN PROBLEMS OF LEXICOGRAPHY

 I. The problem of classification of english dictionaries.
II. Selection of head words.
III. The arrangement and contents of the vocabulary entry.
IV. The principles of sense definitions.
V. Semantic and functional classification of words.

 Classification of english dictionaries

According to nature dictionaries may be divided:
a) General dictionaries(contain lexical units in ordinary use with
this or that proportion of itmes various spheres of life.
b) Restricted dictionaries.
According to the information they contain linguistic dictionaries
are divided:
a) Presenting a wide range of data(explanatory dictionaries).
b) Specialised dictionaries(dealing with lexical units in relation to
some of thheir characteristics).
According to the language of explenation:
a) Monolingual
b) Bilingual
According to prospective user:
a) Dictionaries for scholarly users.
b) Dictionaries for students.
 c) Dictionaries for general public.

 Problems of dictionary compilation

1. The selection of items for inclusion and their arrangement.
a) The type of lexical units.
b) The number of items to be recorded.
c) What to select and what to leave out ij the dictionary.
d) Which form of the language,spoken or written.
e) Should the dictionary contain absolut and archaic
units,technical terms,dialectisms,collaquialisms.
1. The setting of the entries.
2. The selection arrangement and definition of meanings.the
choice of meanings depends on:what aim the compillers set
themselves and divisions they make concerning the extent to
which absolete,archaic,dialectical or highly specialised
meanings should be recorded.
3. The illustrative examples to be supplied.
4. The supplementary material.
 Problems of compilation of learner’s dictionaries.
 Designed for foreign learners of English, learner’s dictionaries are
characterised by their strictly limited word-list, the great attention is
given to the functioning of lexical units in speech and their strong
perspective orientation

 Etymological structure of the English vocabulary

According to thee origin, the word-stock may be subdivided into 2
main sets :the element of one are native and thee elements of the other
are borrowed.English vocabulary contains 70% of borrowings and 30% of
native elements.Nativee words belong to the original stock known from the
earliest manuscripts of the OE period (anglo,saxon and jutes).They are
further subdivided by diachronic linguistics into those of indo-european
stock and those of common germanic origin.
Foreign elements appeared in the english language due to economical ,
political,cultural and other contacts with other countries of the world. The
main contacts are:
1. Roman conquest
2. Saxon invasion
 3. Introduction of christianity from Rome
4. Scandinavian invasion
5. Roman conquest

Borrowings of thee following periods are:

1. Celtic:car,cosy,crowd
2. Anglo-Saxon:mom ,bread,shire,house
3. Latin borrowings:
i. Roman conquest:street,camp
ii. Introduction to christianity:altar,temple
iii. Reneissance:formula,legal,inferior
1. French borrowings:
i. Norman conquest:foreign,gentle
ii. Reneissance:employee,examinee
1. Scandinavian borrowings: sky,skirt
2. Reneissance:criteria,phenomenon
3. Italian borrowings:umbrella,yellow
4. Russian:sputnik,perestroika
 5. Spanish:marine,cargo,junto,mosquito
6. German :frank, hamburger
7. Oriental:sugar,coffee
8. Worldwide:button,tea,video

 Arrangement of entries
The number of entries also depend on how dictionary compilers solve
the problem of polysemy and homonymy. The order of arrangement
of the entries is in different types of dictionaries.
The order may be:
1. Alphabetical which provides for an easy finding of any word.
2. Cluster type order which requires less space and presents a
clearer picture of each unit with others in language system.
The number of meanings and their choice depend on :
1. The aim the dictionary compilers set themselves
2. How they treat obsolete ,dialectical,highly,specialised
meanings.

There are three ways of arranging words-meanings:

1. Historical order
2. Actual order
3. Logical order

Meaning may be defined in different ways:

 1. By means of descriptive definition
2. By means of encyclopaedic definition
3. With the help of synonymous words and expression
Illustration examples:
1. When are examples be used
2. What words may be listed without any illustration
The supplementary material appended to the dictionary may be:
1. Material of linguistic nature pertaining to the vocabulary
2. Material of encyclopaedic nature.

 Semantic and functional classification of words

Words do not have meanings,meanings have words.The contextualist
school of thought that derives from firth puts flesh onto the notion of
arbitrariness in declaring the meaning of a word can only be fully
appreciated in context.The context is primordial.This posses a major
problem in dictionary writing as an entry is always out of context
.Meaning represent a challenge to both the lexicographer and the
dictionary user.For the lexicographer meaning must be transferred
from context to the dictionary entry using a metalanguage that is
sufficiently clear to the user.For the user , the challenge is to transfer
meaning from the dictionary to the text and in writing from the
dictionary to a new context.
A revolution in dictionary making come with the development of
corpus linguistics,built on the contextualist view of meaning and its
transfer to lexicographical practice.Corpus linguistic meant analysis
of words in context to demonstrate use in context .

 Selection of head words

The selection of headwords is related to the scope of the dictionary
and its static vs. dynamic “dictionary under construction” conception
(on these aspects, cf. Atkins & Rundell 2008: 160 ff.; Klosa
2013: 518; Schnorch 2005: 71; Wiegand 1983). Since our
lexicographic resource is intended to be a digital one, in terms of
quantity, our list of headwords is per definition dynamic and
extensible.
As shown in Section 4, for the first step of dictionary creation we used
the most common one-word lemmas with a prominent frequency
difference between FOLK and De Re Ko . The combination of
automated procedures and manual analysis of the data has proven to
be an effective and sustainable way of approaching the task of
headword selection. With the help of the tool for automatic sorting
and filtering of the headword candidates according to their parts of
speech, frequency and other features, the selection of more
headwords can be carried out in a transparent and scalable way in
further steps of our project, and can be enhanced in significantly.
The measure of frequency class difference proved to be a suitable
measure for detecting the difference in the lemma distribution in the
two corpora. Since we integrated the other measures that were com-
monly used for lemma frequency comparison as well, we can further
investigate the effects of other measures and compare them with
each other in further studies.
We did not encounter any great discrepancies that emerged from
different lemmatization conventions in the two corpora, presumably
because we worked with frequent lemmas and closely comparable
operationalisations. However, the lemmatization process and the
varieties of conventions in the German language corpora are certainly
an issue that has to be taken into consideration when comparing
the sets of lemmas in two corpora in future works.
The detection of one-word lemmas is only the first step towards a set
of headwords needed to represent the lexicon of spoken German in
interaction, which is also built upon multi-word expressions to a
significant degree. In further steps of our project, we will work on the
 lexicographic implementation and the detection and integration of
such expressions into our headword concept.

 Lexicography and linguistic

Lexicology is the general study of the vocabulary of languages. It investigates

both diachronic aspects – such as the etymology of individual words or the development of
morphological features for specific word classes, etc. – and synchronic aspects related to
contemporary meaning, usage and collocation. Important concepts in lexicology include the
grouping of words according to such semantic notions a semantic/word fields, thesauri, and
of course prototypes.
While lexicology investigates the lexicon as a research object per se, lexicography pursues a
much more practical aim, i.e. to represent the meaning of words and their associated usage to
either native speakers or learners of a language. It usually does this in the form of various
different types of dictionaries. In order to achieve this, it is important for lexicographers to
have an idea about which core vocabulary items can/should be used in order to explain other
entries, something that can be at least partially achieved by investigating the most frequent
entries in word lists, although the notion of what constitutes core vocabulary is by no means a
well-defined one yet. Other techniques from corpus linguistics, such
as concordancing or collocational analysis, can either be used in order to identify appropriate
example sentences or to illustrate the grammatical environments applicable of.

 Llexicography to a theory of language performance

Chomsky was interested in the relations between language and logic,

and like most great Western thinkers before him, he assumed that
logic underlies language. It is not entirely clear why we should accept
that the relationship is this way round. What would it be like if we worked
on the hypothesis that logic is a construct just one among many on
natural language? Or rather,since there are many logics, that logics are
constructs of natural language. I will not pursue this point in any detail
here, but one possible benefit of turning the language - logic relationship
on its head is that it would free up the study of natural language from the
constraint of assuming that linguistic behaviour is necessarily logical (in
particular, that it is governed by a particular kind of logic), and that if it
isn’t some performance error must be involved.If, instead of seeking the
underlying logical structure of sentences, we look at linguistic behaviour
as a form of social interaction, then we can link language performance to
social theory In Foundations of Social Theory (1990), James Coleman
observes that fashions and tastes are collective processes. Stanley
Lieberson summarizes the argument as follows:
One’s choice is affected by the choices that others make, and since
this is the case for all others, "there is some kind of dependency
among the actions; individuals are not acting independently."
Human language users are not acting independently, and the choice
of words to make meanings is determined by collective processes. The
selectional preferences of words that are so striking when we look at
language in masse, as recorded in a corpus, are as much a matter of
fashion as anything else, but fashion with an utterly serious purpose,
namely to communicate with, and interact with, other people. When
language users flout convention, by exploiting some norm of meaning
or belief, they do so for rhetorical effect, in order to get the attention
of an audience,or to make a point in a way that will impinge on the
audience’s consciousness and be noticed and remembered.
Social theorists such as Lieberson and Schelling also account for the
rapidity with which social conventions can change. Schelling studied
the process by which a racially mixed area can suddenly lose its
equilibrium and become segregated:
1. A small number of people from a new ethnic group moves into a
neighbourhood.
2. Their presence increases the propensity of other members of that
group to move in.
3. There is a decline in the propensity of members of other groups to
move in.
4. The propensity of members of other ethnic groups to move out
increases.
 Language impinges on every aspect of our being and is central to the
vast majority of our everyday activities, so it is hardly surprising that
an exceptionally wide range of theories is called for to account for so
wide-ranging a phenomenon as human language. For all their desire
to present transformational-generative theory as psychologically real,
much of the work of the Chomskyans is really about the relationship
between language and logic, and in this regard it raises fundamental
unanswered questions. To return to the question with which I started,
it is hard to see how transformational-generative linguistic theory
could be of much interest to lexicography. In the first place, its great
insights are focused on the clause or sentence as a unit, not on the
word or phrase, which are the ranks of unit that are of interest to
lexicography. In the second place, the logical relations which perme-
ate traditional lexicography are inherited from the traditional logic of
Leibniz and others, going back to the medieval schoolmen and
beyond. I have been arguing that these traditional notions
need to be replaced, but by the analytical concepts inherited from
modern prototype theory and theories of social convention, not by the
logical relations accounted for in transformational-generative
theory.Observation of the psychological realities suggests that human
beings have simultaneously both digital and analogical reasoning
powers. We all have the ability to calculate (though some people
are better at it than others), and we all have the ability to draw
analogies (though some analogies are more imaginative and
informative or should we say far-fetched than others).
Somehow these two abilities coexist in a single human skull, and both
are invoked as we interact with other members of our own species.
When all is said and done, human beings are social animals, and
language is the instrument of their sociability. A satisfactory theory of
language performance, therefore, must be pursued as a subset of
social theory, explaining the preferences of linguistic units in terms of
the forces governing collective behaviour and the vagaries of fashion,
rather than in terms of logical structures.
A language consists of sets of units and structures, structures which
are activated by people behaving linguistically. Units at the word level
more strictly speaking, at the lexeme level are fired up and pressed
into service by speakers or writers seeking to make meanings,
Treating meanings as events rather than objects yields a more
satisfactory explanation of the dynamic nature of language than
treating them as objects
 .

 Noah Webster
American lexicographer known for his American Spelling Book (1783)
and his American Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vol. (1828;
2nd ed., 1840). Webster was instrumental in giving
American English a dignity and vitality of its own. Both his speller
and dictionary reflected his principle that spelling, grammar, and
usage should be based upon the living, spoken language rather than
on artificial rules. He also made useful contributions as a teacher,
grammarian, journalist, essayist, lecturer, and lobbyist.