[Lexicog] texts on lexicography

[Patrick Hanks]

1. The new 14-volume Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd
edition (ed.
Keith Brown, 2005) -- also published electronically, by the way -- contains,
among other
good things:

       25 longish articles on "topics in lexicography", including:
              Bilingual lexicography
              Definition
              Etymology
              Lexicon grammars
              ...
       47 survey articles on lexicography around the world, ranging from the
very
             general (Lexicography in Africa) to the very particular
(Estonian lexicography,
             Indian lexicography, Chinese lexicography).

See http://www1.elsevier.com/homepage/sal/ell2/lex.html

2. For those interested in the use of computers and corpora in modern
lexicography, frame
semantics and lexicography, etc., a useful collection of papers is:

M.H. Correard (ed., 2002): Lexicography and Natural Language Processing, A
Festschrift in Honour of
BTS Atkins.

The publisher is Euralex.

Patrick



----- Original Message ----- 
From: <maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>; "Emrah Özcan" <ozcanemrah at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, May 26, 2006 4:54 PM
Subject: Re: [Lexicog] lexicography text


I haven't looked at a lexicography book in a long time (confession),
but I will say that there are at least two widely dispersed audiences
for such books: one is people who are writing unabridged dictionaries
for their language, where that language has a long literary history.
The other audience is people who are writing the first (or maybe
second) dictionary ever for some minority language, and the dictionary
is bilingual (or in some cases, polylingual).  And the language in
question may be only recently written, so there is no large literature.

(There are of course in-between positions on this spectrum.)

While there are commonalities between the two cases--what makes a good
example sentence, for instance--there is also a vast gap.  Issues of
sort order, choice of citation form, even spelling conventions come up
for minority language dictionaries, but seldom if ever arise for
"large" languages.  Issues of dealing with large corpora, OTOH, come up
with "large" languages, while linguists working with minority languages
only wish they had that problem.

So if you are working with a minority language, you may find some good
ideas in lexicography books of the superhighway type (how to write the
OED or Webster's Unabridged), but be sure to supplement those books
with books that talk about dirt roads.  One of my favorites in this
latter bunch was

  Bartholomew, Doris A. and Louise C. Schoenhals. 1983.  Bilingual
dictionaries for indigenous languages.  Mexico: Summer Institute of
Linguistics.

This is now dated (little or no discussion of computers, for instance),
and I believe it's out of print (but large portions were embedded into
SIL's LinguaLinks help system).  But the discussions of how to create
good example sentences were, as I recall, excellent, and such things
don't go out of date.  (Now watch somebody reply to this and tell me
that that is indeed out of date!)



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