World Author’s Eptography: Prehistory, Contemporary State, Prospects

The article deals with a direction of author’s lexicography, which is actively developing but insufficiently studied in science. The direction focuses on the influence of an outstanding person’s speech creativity on the development of a linguaculture. The article aims to establish the lexicographic conceptions of reflecting the author’s word that exists in speech in the world’s dictionary practice and to substantiate the need for the development of eptography (dictionary description of eptonyms (L.P. Diadechko), i.e., winged words in the narrow sense, along with phraseological units and proverbs) as an independent genre. Over 70 dictionaries of quotations and their derivatives have been analyzed to achieve the aim. Of them, 48 are dictionaries describing a few language families discussed in the article. These units are differently termed in national philological traditions; therefore, a number of concepts were clarified. Thus, using the method of calculations, a fundamental difference was proved in the quantitative composition of components of eptonyms and quotations: in the dictionary of eptonyms from Woe from Wit, all expressions are subject to Miller’s formula 7 ± 2, while, in quotation dictionaries, 40-70 % of register units exceed the upper limit, including from 10 to 50 or more words. A quantitative analysis also helped to separate eptonyms from inter-textemes (K.P. Sidorenko) and from winged quotations: both are recorded by the compilers of dictionaries only in one or two contexts; therefore, it is impossible to assert their integration in speech usage. The results of experiments carried out on the material of Russian, Ukrainian, and Turkish showed that, in mass linguistic consciousness, eptonyms are stored in the unity of new form and new content, different from those that characterize original text fragments. Taking into account the structural, semantic, and functional properties and principles of the dictionary description of the author’s word as “alien” made it possible to distinguish four genres: 1) dictionaries of quotations, 2) dictionaries of intertextemes, 3) dictionaries of winged quotations, 4) dictionaries of eptonyms. Each of them is important for national linguacultures: dictionaries of quotations reflect the national linguistic picture of the world in the person of its bright representative; dictionaries of intertextemes and winged quotations, in addition, demonstrate the existence of author’s expression in speech. However, only dictionaries of eptonyms provide information about the new linguistic unit that has emerged based on the author’s text: variants of its structure, semantics, and features of functioning in speech. Therefore, the significance of eptonymic dictionaries, compiled so far only on the material of East Slavic languages, is the same as that of general explanatory dictionaries. The prerequisites for the development of author’s eptography have already been created: the emergence of the genre of dictionaries of quotations, intertextemes, and winged quotations in the world dictionary practice is, in fact, its prehistory.

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