How to make a dictionary - Lecture 5

Lecture Five, 13th of November 2007

Revision


1. Introduction
2. Learner's Diary
3. Tasks and Quizzes
4. Evaluation
5. References


1. Introduction

The lecture was a revision of the topics of the last lectures. Mr. Gibbon talked about the different types of dictionaries and its different parts and again OneLook.



2. Learner's Diary


Different types of dictionaries

semasiological dictionary

- reader’s dictionary, or decoding dictionary
- you have the appearance, but you look for the word: spelling, meaning

onomasiological dictionary
- writer’s dictionary, or encoding dictionary
- an example is the thesaurus
- you know the meaning, but you are looking for another word (for the appearance)


Parts of the dictionary

Microstructure

- organisation of the actual lexical entry
- Information bout the structure of the word
- Organisation of the lexical information
- Content: pragmatics, semantics

the microstructure of a dictionary is the consistent organisation of lexical information in the dictionary


Macrostructure

- Body of the dictionary
- Types of macrostructure: Organising macrostructure by semasiological and onomasiological
- Organisation of lexical entries
macrostructure is the organisation of the lexical entries in the body of a dictionary into lists, tree structures, networks


Mesostructure

- Links between different kinds of information
- Structure which holds the dictionary together
- Links to other examples/entries/ parts of the dictionary/text
- Cross references
- the mesostructure of a dictionary is the set of relations between lexical
entries and other entities such as other parts of a dictionary or a text corpus


Megastructure

- includes micro-, macro and mesostructure and metadata
- front matter (title, publisher)
- abbreviations and explanations of grammar (e.g. adj for adjective)
- the body of the dictionary (entries)
- the back matter (explanations, advertisement
entire structure of the dictionary


Illustration of table construction




Homonym
spelling and pronunciation is the same

Homophone
same pronunciation, not the same spelling (meet, meat)

Homograph
same spelling, not the same pronunciation (export, export)



4. Evaluation

The revision was very useful, some topics are a little bit difficult.



5. References

http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/~gibbon/Classes/Classes2007WS/ITL/index.html