Volume 30, Issue 2014

In every stage of dictionary-making and in every scientific analysis which is carried out in the field of dictionary research methods are used to reach certain results. However, at present there is no comprehensive and up-to-date documentation of these particular methods. This article provides a general overview of methods in lexicography and dictionary research and of the areas these methods are applied in, and it introduces the further, specialized contributions of the Thematic Part of this issue. A selected bibliography with about 340 titles on methods in lexicography concludes this overview.

This contribution provides an overview of some of the methods used in relation to the function theory. It starts with a definition of the concept of method and the relation existing between theory and method. It establishes an initial distinction between artisanal and theory-based methods and argues that current lexicographical methods should be embedded in an advanced theory in order to guarantee the needed innovation in the e-environment. Then it presents a number of general principles of methodology applied by supporters of the function theory. On this basis, it proceeds to a discussion of various methods used in the different sub-phases of the overall dictionary compilation process, from the making of the concept to the preparation for publication on the chosen media, with focus on the Internet. Finally, it briefly discusses some of the methods used to create and test the function theory itself as well as the various specific sub-theories related to this general theory.

The German dictionary market has been confronted with a dramatic change in the past years. Traditional dictionary publishers shrank dramatically or even disappeared completely, and the largest academic dictionary, the Grimmsches Worterbuch, will definitely stop its work in 2016. This paper discusses how large documentary reference dictionaries can be planned and produced in this new context for the German market. The focus of this paper is put on the technological conditions and their impact on planning the lexicographical process, including the corpus base, automatization of information extraction, aggregation of existing information, workflow management, online-publication as well as user contributions. Several examples of existing German and English dictionary projects are discussed with respect to these aspects. A particular focus is placed on the Digitales Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache (DWDS). It is shown how the new technological possibilities help to balance richness and up-to-dateness of information with consistency and a minimum amount of redundancy, and more generally how a flexible project workflow can be established where time and budget constraints can be adapted to the project goals.

The methods utilized in the area of research into dictionary use are established research methods in the social sciences. After explicating the different steps of a typical empirical investigation, this article provides examples of how these different methods are used in various user studies conducted in the field of using online dictionaries. Thereby, different kinds of data collection (surveys as online questionnaires, log files and eye tracking) as well as different research design structures (for instance, ex-post-facto design or experimental design) are discussed.

In recent years, new developments in the area of lexicography have altered not only the management, processing and publishing of lexicographical data, but also created new types of products such as electronic dictionaries and thesauri. These expand the range of possible uses of lexical data and support users with more flexibility, for instance in assisting human translation. In this article, we give a short and easy-to-understand introduction to the problematic nature of the storage, display and interpretation of lexical data. We then describe the main methods and specifications used to build and represent lexical data. This paper is targeted for the following groups of people: linguists, lexicographers, IT specialists, computer linguists and all others who wish to learn more about the modelling, representation and visualization of lexical knowledge. This paper is written in two languages: French and German.

In this article, we study lexicographical methods of collaborative dictionaries. We are particularly interested in the question to what extent they differ from the methods of expert lexicographers and how editorial dictionaries can leverage the user-generated data. We find that the preparation phase is equally important in expertbuilt and collaborative works and will fundamentally shape the final dictionary. For collaborative dictionaries, it is, however, essential to encourage discussion, define transparent decision workflows, and continually motivate the authors. The large user communities provide a high coverage of language varieties, translations, neologisms, as well as personal and spoken language, which often lack corpus evidence. Instead, their descriptions of general language terms are largely based on expert-built dictionaries. This is why we see great potential in the cooperation between expert lexicographers and collaborative user communities. Besides joint work on editing the dictionary articles, we consider quality assurance methods based on user feedback as a clear enrichment for dictionary making.

The objective of the present paper is to examine methods used in both translation studies and bilingual lexicography. The starting point of the analysis is a description of the close relationship between translation and bilingual dictionaries and of the role these dictionaries, also known as translating dictionaries, play in the translation process. This is followed by the examination of the status of translation studies and lexicography, methods which they employ as well as their relations to neighbouring (sub)disciplines. It is these interrelations that result in the multitude and diversity of the methods as these are for the most part taken over from the related fields of science. The most important concept common for the two investigated fields, i.e. translation studies and lexicography, is equivalence, on which issue the author concentrates in the ensuing part of the paper as she analyses methods of establishing the equivalence between the units of the source and target language.

This paper presents theoretical and methodological approaches to Terminology that are well known in Brazil, giving special attention to the production of dictionaries and similar reference work based on corpora. A collation of the many theoretical approaches and terminography practices is provided, inviting the reader to learn more about Special-Language Lexicography (SLL) in Brazil. In order to better illustrate Brazilian terminography production, a background on three different terminographic reference works recently developed in the Brazilian scenario using corpora is brought forth: a dictionary about ceramic tiles, a glossary of Oncomastology and an extensive dictionary of Dermatology. At the end of this paper, information about computational resources, such as ontologies and tools for representation of text-based content, is introduced, indicating new methodological approaches for new dictionaries.

Based on the terms normphonetics and standard pronunciation aims, methods and problems of (German) standard pronunciation studies and its codification in pronunciation dictionaries will be shown, also in terms of history. Normphonetical transcription in the list of words as well as means of describing phonostilistical variation will be explained by the example of Deutsches Ausspracheworterbuch (German Pronunciation Dictionary, DAWB 2009).

Once a new word or a new meaning is added to a monolingual dictionary, the lexicographer is to provide a definition of this item. This paper focuses on the methodological challenges in writing such definitions. After a short discussion of the central terminology (method and definition), the article describes factors which inform this process: linguistic theories, linguistic and lexicographical methods, and types of definitions. Using the example of elexiko, a dictionary project of the Institute for the German language (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany, the paper finally showcases the compilation of definitions in a monolingual online dictionary of contemporary German.

German pronunciation dictionaries provide codifications that claim to be accepted as standard. When it comes to foreign names and words, the two most established German pronunciation dictionaries and the ARD pronunciation database have rather oppositional approaches. This heterogeneous situation on the prescriptive side is mirrored by countless incidences of inconsistent pronunciations of foreign names in the media. Therefore, empirical studies like comparisons of dictionaries, analyses of media pronunciation as well as online preference polls are necessary to be able to find pronunciation rules for foreign names and words that can be accepted as standard in a German context.

This article starts by providing a brief summary of relevance theory in information science in relation to the function theory of lexicography, explaining the different types of relevance, viz. objective system relevance and the subjective types of relevance, i.e. topical, cognitive, situational, socio-cognitive and affective relevance. It then shows, at the hand of examples, why relevance is important from a user perspective in the extra-lexicographical pre- and post-consultation phases and in the intra-lexicographical consultation phase. It defines an additional type of subjective relevance that is very important for lexicography as well as for information science, viz. functional relevance. Since all lexicographic work is ultimately aimed at satisfying users’ information needs, the article then discusses why the lexicographer should take note of all these types of relevance when planning a new dictionary project, identifying new tasks and responsibilities of the modern lexicographer. The article furthermore discusses how relevance theory impacts on teaching dictionary culture and reference skills. By integrating insights from lexicography and information science, the article contributes to new ideas for both disciplines.

By means of a review of the use of the term gloss in the past three decades it becomes evident that the term gloss needs to be explained more precisely. After a brief discussion of the practice of lexicographic glossing it is clear that the mainreason for the use of the method of glossing lies therein that many words from the core lexicon have numerous cotext-specific senses and, for various reasons, restricted ways of being used. Because of the lack of an overview of the different types of glosses a typology of glosses with regard to their structure and topic is developed. In addition, different types of elementary and extended glosses are distinguished from sequences of glosses. Furthermore, different types of semantic glosses, e.g. semantically non-identified semantic glosses and (up to now not yet investigated) semantically identified semantic glosses with numerous subtypes as well as a variety of further types of semantic-pragmatic glosses are distinguished. The latter types have not yet been investigated although numerous subtypes can be distinguished, e.g. pragmatic- commenting semantic glosses and pragmatic-commented semantic glosses. It is furthermore shown that the functional equal post- and inner glosses have different places in a typology of lexicographic text segments because they are structurally different. For extended glosses different types of gloss segments are distinguished, e.g. pragmatic-commenting, semantic-commenting and -identifying as well as glossing gloss segments with numerous subtypes. A next section is dedicated to gloss addressing: gloss addressing, gloss-internal and gloss-excurrent gloss segment addressing are presented and different gloss accompanying addressing constellations are distinguished. All relations in which glosses occur are then investigated. Finally the different non-hierarchical as well as hierarchical gloss structures are presented.

In this contribution, we analyze concrete user needs in reception situations based on concrete text examples. The point of departure is that a potential dictionary user reads a text and does not understand a word or a fixed expression, and therefore he seeks help in an information tool. Our topic is how lexicographers can provide the kind of help that the dictionary user needs to solve his reception problem. In order to do this, our starting point is not: “encyclopedic items do not belong to dictionaries” or “you always have to follow a certain schema for meaning explanations”. The starting point is: what meaning elements are needed to give the dictionary user the help he seeks (here: understand a word)? And how could and should these meaning elements be incorporated, i.e. formulated and presented, in the dictionary article? Having user needs as our focus point, we try to isolate and extract data elements from a text corpus, in which we find a number of text examples, collocations, synonyms, links, images etc. Among these different types of data, we select a number of meaning elements; these meaning elements could be presented in one field (the meaning field), but in many cases they are distributed into different parts of a dictionary entry, e.g. links, lexical remarks and synonym remarks. This distribution as well as the formulation of the meaning elements will depend on the user and his needs.

The concepts and terms of modern lexicography and variational linguistics (sociolinguistics) give clear evidence of a common interdependent history. The present study will first give a short overview of the genesis of the diasystem and the accompanying terms ‘diachronic’, ‘diaphasic’, ‘diastratic’ coined by Flydal, Weinreich and Coseriu as well as the later adoption and enlargement by Hausmann for lexicographic purposes. The second aim of the study is therefore not to question the still useful metalexicographic model in general, but just to contribute to a precise terminology by replacing the Hausmann term ‘diaintegrative’ by ‘diaxenic’ which for several reasons might be more adequate to express the foreignness of the so marked lexemes. Thirdly the present article tries to show the differences in the marking system of several Spanish, Italian and French dictionaries. To detect the gap between theoretical claim and practical application, the treatment of foreign words, especially the often controversial anglicisms, seemed to be most promising. The result of this empiric study showed not only the discrepancy between the dictionaries’ philosophies, expressed in the forewords, and the application under the respective lemma, but also that tolerance towards loanwords and adoption of modern linguistic research knowledge depends very much on lexicographic traditions.

The re-vitalization of indigenous languages depends on political and legal support and the implementation of language rights depends on knowledge of vocabulary and grammar structures of the individual languages. Throughout the nineteenth century world, compilers of dictionaries adapted indigenous languages to match standards defined in nation-building and, thereby, enabled latent possibilities for indigenous populations to re-vitalize their languages in connection with the United Nations Year for Indigenous Peoples in 1993, and the first United Nations Decade for Indigenous Peoples, 1995-2004. This article focuses on dictionaries of the languages of the Ainu populations in the borderlands between the nation-states Japan and Russia. The main argument is that the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act promulgated in 1997 had a significant impact on the production and purpose of Ainu dictionaries. The dictionaries prior to 1997 functioned, predominantly, as records, which contributed to the increased visibility of Ainu populations inside and outside Japan in the immediate national interests of Japan, whereas the dictionaries published after 1997 are intended to enable the active use of Ainu language today. An important sub-point is that the post-1997 Ainu dictionaries rely heavily on dictionaries, word lists, and grammar books compiled before 1997, which have therefore come to support efforts to re-vitalize Ainu languages in the twenty-first century.

The following report shows the changes of EMLex concerning the organisation and implementation of the course and a short overview over the international summer term which took place 2014 at the University of Santiago de Compostela.