The electronic dictionary of a linguoculturological type project: general conception and the specifics of technical realization

During the work over a dictionary theory and practice are inseparably connected; lin-guoculturology is no exception. Linguoculturological and ethnolinguistic dictionaries are the product of theoretical research, summarizing and concluding on the one hand, and a dictionary itself can become a valuable database for analysis and new researches on the other. Dictionaries of such a type require a more complicated way of data organization: this is due to the fact that in the sight of a lexicographer there are extralinguistic phenomena (customs, rites, gestures, suits.) along with linguistic ones, they require a particular approach to the possibility of their representation within a dictionary entry limits. However, the real specifics of the material representing in a dictionary of a linguoculturological type, united with navigational and technical possibilities of the modern computational lexicography, can produce some impressive results. The analysis of current linguoculturological and ethnolinguistic dictionaries allows to come to a conclusion that despite active growth of corpus linguistics and computational lexicography in recent years domestic science has not created any electronic dictionaries. The authors of this paper aim at solving the task of development of an electronic dictionary of the linguoculturological type; as an illustration of such a dictionary it was decided to develop and implement an electronic dictionary of national signs. The realization of this project proposes the elaboration of the general concept of the dictionary, the structure (model) of a dictionary entry, the principles of organisation of the material presented in the dictionary and the development of software which is supposed to ensure the most convenient dictionary usage. The dictionary to be created must be the utility for the researchers who work with national signs as well as for common language speakers who are interested in national signs and superstitions. Thus, any potential reader (user) of the dictionary interested in national signs and superstitions can get access to a large amount of national signs (about 1500 units at the moment) united into one electronic lexicographical material. At the same time, the project does not include the national signs corpus creation only; according to the authors' concept, it serves to join the material (national signs) with its lin-guoculturological commentary. This, in its turn, is the essential distinguishing feature of the dictionary. The work on the dictionary creation goes in two directions simultaneously. The first direction includes the preparatory work (the material collection), its classification according to different arguments, and the linguoculturological analysis of the national signs. The second direction applies to the technical realization of the dictionary. In the context of this direction, in its turn, it is possible to define two steps of realization: the first step implies the creation of a builder for making dictionaries of a linguoculturological type; the second step implies the creation of a linguoculturological dictionary of national signs using the dictionary builder. In this case the electronic dictionary of national signs serves as the test domain for the builder project. The authors of this paper found out that there are no unified software products among the ways of electronic dictionary creation; in other words, there are no universal software programmes for making electronic dictionaries; almost all relevant software is developed for particular proprietary dictionaries and cannot be used by other lexicographers - this illustrates the topicality and utility value of the announced dictionary project.

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