On Information Types in a Bilingual Dictionary

The article aims to make an inventory of the information types that an academic bilingual dictionary (i.e. a dictionary providing reliable information on lexical systems of the two contrasted languages) should contain. Empirical data were collected from the New German-Russian Comprehensive Dictionary (in three volumes, edited by D. Dobrovol'skij) and the upcoming Active German-Russian Dictionary. The authors argue that not only should the data get updated in dictionaries, but the principles of their structuring have to be regularly reconsidered in order to make them consistent with the trends in contemporary linguistic studies too. Today, we see quite clearly what types of lexicographic information an academic explanatory dictionary should contain; hence, there is an obvious need to adapt these principles to bilingual dictionaries. The specific feature of a bilingual dictionary is that it has to take into account the specificities of both the source language L1 and the target language L2. Describing types of lexicographic information, relevant for a bilingual dictionary, the authors take into account the need: (1) to ensure a systematic description of the words of the same lexicographic type; (2) to reveal and record relevant characteristics of a word's formal behaviour, namely, its capacity to carry the phrase stress, the word's defective paradigm along with its inability to have some grammatical forms in certain meanings, etc. Information types of most interest and importance appear to be the following: (i) pronunciation particularities (including the accent allocation of the word's components and the phrase stress); (ii) grammatical characteristics; (iii) differentiation of meanings and translation of lexemes (i.e. cross-linguistic functional equivalence and the means to record it). Methodologically, this study relies on Ju.D. Apresjan's lexicographic works. Two principles he devised are central to dictionary of any kind: the principle of integrated description of a language (i.e. description in which the dictionary is tuned to grammar, and grammar to the dictionary) and the systematicity principle. According to the integration principle, any case in which the grammatical behaviour of a lexeme does not follow regular rules should be registered in a dictionary entry. Applying these principles in bilingual lexicography encounters additional difficulties; cf., for example, the cases in which two compared units of L1 and L2 show significant differences in their syntactic behaviour. The concept of information types opens up new perspectives in bilingual lexicography. First, it helps to structure a dictionary entry by dividing it into ∕ones and sub-∕ones for registering information of a given type, which serves to unify the metalanguage of description. Second, for each information type, there should be a corresponding group of words that have a certain feature in common, i.e. when specifying an information type, there also arises a need to specify what words it characteri∕es, hence to define a group of words with a given common feature. Third, once we take into consideration different information types, a bilingual dictionary, then, becomes a result of contrasting lexical systems of two languages rather than just an inventory of lexical units and their translations. With this concept, bilingual lexicography enters the field of academic research.

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