A Practical Guide to Lexicography (review)

This volume has been written by a team of authors with different kinds of expertise in the field of lexicography. It is divided into seven chapters dealing with seven major lexicographic problems, each containing several articles on special issues.

In Ch. 1, ‘Foundations’, van Sterkenburg defines a ‘prototypical dictionary’ and outlines a brief history of dictionaries. František Čermák analyzes various kinds of source materials for dictionaries. Paul Bogaards gives an overview of the different approaches towards uses and users of dictionaries, commenting on the methods used as well as on the results obtained. Rufus Gouws focuses on the approaches to the structure of dictionaries, as well as on article and lemma types. Piet Swanepoel presents a pragmatically oriented dictionary typology and notes that due to constant innovations, any typology of this kind needs constant updating.

Ch. 2 contains six articles concerning descriptive lexicography. Johan de Caluwe and Ariane van Santen examine how dictionaries provide information on phonology, morphology, and syntax, referring especially to monolingual English dictionaries. Dirk Geeraerts analyzes the main choices of the lexicographer when dealing with the presented semantic information. Stanisław Prędota focuses on dictionaries of proverbs, presenting their macro- and microstructure and a typology of English proverb books. Igor Burkhanov outlines lexicographic techniques of representing pragmatic information, the usage indications, basic techniques of pragmatic specification, exemplification, and so on. Johan de Caluwé and Johan Taeldeman deal with lexicographic information on morphology, comparing the presentation of derivations and compounds in several dictionaries. Piet van Sterkenburg examines onomasiological dictionaries, the onomasiological specifications in dictionaries, and electronic onomasiology.

Ch. 3 analyzes special types of dictionaries. Mike Hannay looks at different types and characteristic features of bilingual dictionaries. The basic concepts, characteristics, and compilation of specialized dictionaries are the subject of Lynne Bowker’s article.

Ch. 4, ‘Corpora for dictionaries’, includes John Sinclair’s contribution on the design and processing of the corpus and the acquisition and classification of the texts in it, Truus Kruyt’s article on the multifunctional linguistic databases and their exploitation, and Daniel Ridings’s presentation of a concrete example illustrating the specifications a lexicographer should require of software for dictionary making.

In Ch. 5, ‘Design of dictionaries’, Lineke Oppentocht and Rik Schutz comment on the effect that technological developments have and will have on the dictionary medium. Krista Varantola discusses the structure of dictionaries from the user’s angle, and Sean Michael Burke attempts to describe the design of online lexicons.

Ch. 6 concerns the realization of dictionaries. It contains a couple of articles dealing with the codification of various types of information provided by dictionaries: phonological, morphological, and syntactic (Geert Booij), semantic (Fons Moerdijk), etymological (Nicoline van der Sijs), and the usage of labels (Henk Verkuyl, Maarten Janssen, and Frank Jansen). John Simpson describes the collecting, processing, and use of occurrence examples in dictionaries.

Ch. 7 focuses on the design of bilingual (Wim Honselaar), terminological (Willy Martin and Hennie van der Vliet), and monolingual dictionaries (Ferenc Kiefer and Piet van Sterkenburg), as well as an ‘ideal’ dictionary of English collocations (Stefania Nuccorini).

According to the words of the editor, the volume was designed as an easily accessible introduction to the world of lexicography and a reliable compass for those wishing to know how dictionaries are made. The authors have more than fulfilled these objectives. The reader is acquainted with the theory and with the state-of-the-art methods of lexicography. Each chapter provides the most current information about diverse aspects of dictionary functioning, structure, compilation, and usage. The book will become a convenient tool for lexicographers, but...