Concordance of the 21st century: a new old form

The article is devoted to concordance, an acknowledged and most frequently used dictionary form in author lexicography. Widely used abroad in the past centuries, this type of dictionary had been overlooked in Russia up to the end of the 20th century. However, we observe a change at the verge of the 21st century fostered by the boom of computer technologies which enable creation of progressive software word processors now available to all concerned. We have also witnessed a change in the attitude to concordance: scholars have appreciated its research potential. The article explains that the majority of concordance dictionaries produced in the recent years basically retain the conventional form but differ essentially in respect of the principles of dictionary formation, the number of analyzed contexts and additional information presented within. This fact explains the appearance of special terms for the nomination: concordance of a new type, concordance of an updated type, concordance of a new generation. With several author dictionaries as an example, the characteristic features of a new generation concordance are concluded, among which are special approaches to the entry title, to separation of homonyms, to commentaries within a dictionary entry, to usage of different tags, etc. The article dwells specifically on the concordances of non-ritual lyrical songs which are created by linguofolkorists from Kursk. The uniqueness of this dictionary form is proved on the instance of concordance of the Siberian songs of the 19th century which are a part of the 7-volume collection Velikorusskie narodnye pesni [Great Russian Folk Songs] by Sobolevsky A.I. The presented examples of dictionary entries illustrate the efficiency of concordance in studying folklore texts in several aspects: from determination of meanings and systems of meanings up to defining characteristic syntagmatic links and studying word capacity to participate in tropes. The author concludes that concordance gives objective and organized language facts without interpreting them, thus being a reliable basis of folklore language research. Concordance of a new type still retains a conventional structure but presents a special approach to the arrangement of vocabulary, illustrative material and examples. All this gives new opportunities to philologists in interpreting data according to their own needs and issues.

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