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Lexicography (Greek, ‘writing about words’), in linguistics, is a practical discipline which deals with the planning and compilation of reference works based on lexical information. Monolingual and multilingual dictionaries are complemented by specialist dictionaries for numerous subjects (for example, medicine, law or navigation) and styles (for example, regional dialects or slang). Other lexically-oriented reference works include thesauri, glossaries and computerized concordance surveys. The information these works contain often takes on a prescriptive character, and contributes to the standardization of a language by setting out acceptable linguistic norms. Consequently, dictionaries can illuminate our knowledge of social attitudes towards language, as much for what is omitted as for the information they contain.
Many dictionaries include information about linguistic form, including spelling, pronunciation, and morphological inflections as well as syntactic information about part of speech (noun, verb and so on). The actual definition of a word may comprise several kinds of explanation, including, where appropriate, translation, interpretation in terms of a strictly limited set of defining vocabulary, historical information on word origins, discussion, or an example of the word as it is actually used. Dictionary entries may also provide historical information on origin and earliest recorded occurrences, in addition to sociolinguistic data on usage according to region, dialect and style. In recent years, a wide range of texts has been analysed in vast computer surveys, designed so that dictionaries may reflect more accurately how word meanings are partly dependent on the ways in which they are actually used. MS
See also computational linguistics; language planning; lexicology; prescriptive grammar. |
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