Chosen Words

Past and Present Problems for Dictionary Makers
Erscheinungsjahr 1995
ISBN: 978-0-85989-419-7
Verlag: University of Exeter Press

Buch, Englisch, 198 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 232 mm, Gewicht: 424 g

Reihe: Exeter Language and Lexicography

What goes into our dictionaries and why? This informative collection of essays shows how dictionaries today have grown from the small beginnings of English lexicography in Shakespeare's time. Discussion is anchored in the practice of the past, but the author has been concerned throughout to show how the difficulties which beset the first compilers are still with us today. The essays may thus be read as a stimulating, even chastening, introduction to some of the practical problems that might confront any trainee lexicographer.

The product of over forty years' scholarly work on Cawdrey, Kersey, Bailey, Johnson and other lexicographers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these essays cover a wide variety of topics, including dialect words, variant spellings, how strict the alphabetical order can or should be, the treatment of phrasal verbs, of the literary and learned language, of common words, archaism and figurative usage. There are also critical assessments of some of the great historical dictionaries of Europe.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Osselton, Prof. N.E.

Osselton, N.E.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Lexikologie, Lexikographie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Mehrsprachige Wörterbücher

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures

List of Abbreviations

Preface and Acknowledgements

1. The Character of the Earliest English Dictionaries

2. Figurative Words: Modern Practice and the Origins of a Labelling Tradition

3. Common Words: John Kersey and the First General Dictionary of English

4. Dialect Words in General Dictionaries

5. Old Words: Defining Obsolescence

6. Literary Words: Blount's Glossographia and Sir Thomas Browne

7. Setting up a New Bilingual Vernacular Dictionary: Henry Hexham (1647)

8. Style Markers: Early Bilingual Dictionaries and English Usage

9. Fixing the Spelling: Errour and Honor in Johnson and Bailey

10. Phrasal Verbs: Dr Johnson's Use of Bilingual Sources

11. A Dictionary Compiler at Work in the Sixteenth Century

12. Alphabetization in Early Dictionaries of English

13. An Eighteenth-Century Bilingualized Learners' Dictionary

14. Secondary Documentation in Historical Lexicography

15. Dictionary Criticism: Three Historical Dictionaries

16. Bilingual Dictionaries with Dutch: a Case Study in European Lexicography

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

N.E. Osselton has divided his academic career equally between universities in Holland (Groningen, Leiden) and England (Southampton, Newcastle); he has held chairs of English Language in both countries. He was a founder member (and later President) of the European Association for Lexicography and now lives in retirement in Durham.