The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography This page intentionally left blank The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography B. T. Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © B. T. Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell 2008 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Italy by Legoprint S.p.A. ISBN 978–0–19–927770–4 (Hbk.) ISBN 978–0–19–927771–1 (Pbk.) 13579108642 Contents Acknowledgements viii Abbreviations and symbols x 1 Introduction 1 1.1 What this book is about 1 1.2 What lexicographers do 2 1.3 How this book works 5 1.4 And finally . 8 PART I Pre-lexicography Introduction to Part I 15 2 Dictionary types and dictionary users 17 2.1 The birth of a dictionary 18 2.2 Types of dictionary 24 2.3 Types of dictionary user 27 2.4 Tailoring the entry to the user who needs it 35 3 Lexicographic evidence 45 3.1 What makes a dictionary ‘reliable’? 45 3.2 Citations 48 3.3 Corpora: introductory remarks 53 3.4 Corpora: design issues 57 3.5 Collecting corpus data 76 3.6 Processing and annotating the data 84 3.7 Corpus creation: concluding remarks 93 4 Methods and resources 97 4.1 Preliminaries 97 4.2 The dictionary-writing process 97 vi CONTENTS 4.3 Software 103 4.4 The Style Guide 117 4.5 Template entries 123 5 Linguistic theory meets lexicography 130 5.1 Preliminaries 130 5.2 Sense relationships: similarities 132 5.3 Sense relationships: differences 141 5.4 Frame semantics 144 5.5 Lexicographic relevance 150 6 Planning the dictionary 160 6.1 Preliminaries 160 6.2 Types of lexical item 163 6.3 The constituent parts of a dictionary 176 6.4 Building the headword list 178 6.5 Organizing the headword list 190 6.6 Types of entry 193 7 Planning the entry 200 7.1 Preliminaries 200 7.2 Information in the various entry components 202 7.3 Entry structure 246 PART II Analysing the data Introduction to Part II 261 8 Building the database (1): word senses 263 8.1 Preliminaries 263 8.2 Finding word senses: the nature of the task 269 8.3 The contribution of linguistic theory 275 8.4 Word senses and corpus patterns: context disambiguates 294 8.5 Practical strategies for successful WSD 296 8.6 Conclusions 309 CONTENTS vii 9 Building the database (2): the lexical unit 317 9.1 The entry 318 9.2 Data 322 9.3 Using template entries in database building 379 PART III Compiling the entry Introduction to Part III 383 10 Building the monolingual entry 385 10.1 Preliminaries: resources for entry-building 386 10.2 Distributing information: MWEs, run-ons, and senses 394 10.3 Systems for handling grammar and labelling 399 10.4 Definitions: introduction 405 10.5 Definitions: content 413 10.6 Definitions: form 431 10.7 What makes a good definition? 450 10.8 Examples 452 10.9 Completing the entry 462 11 The translation stage 465 11.1 Transfer: translating the database 465 11.2 Equivalence factors 467 11.3 Finding equivalents 473 11.4 Putting translations into the database 479 12 Building the bilingual entry 484 12.1 Resources for entry-building 486 12.2 Distributing information throughout the entry 490 12.3 Writing the entry 499 Bibliography 515 Index 531 Acknowledgements Our thanks go to the many friends and colleagues who have helped us in the making of this book: Valerie Grundy, for her painstaking reading of and gentle comments on some of the chapters in manuscript; Adam Kilgarriff, Penny Silva, and Tony Cowie, for encouraging us to start this project and see it through to the end; Thierry Fontenelle (editor of the com- panion volume to this, Practical Lexicography: A Reader) for his contagious enthusiasm which spurred us on when we were flagging; Charles Fillmore for his kindly and erudite explanations in response to showers of email queries; Philippe Climent for his generous help in producing screenshots good enough for print; Patrick Hanks, Rosamund Moon, Faye Carney, Ramesh Krishnamurthy, Krista Varantola, and Daan Prinsloo for advice and enlightenment at various points along the way; and for answering our many questions about their publications, Catherine Love at HarperCollins, and Vivian Marr and Nicholas Rollin at OUP. We are grateful, too, to OUP’s editorial team – John Davey, Chloe Plummer, Karen Morgan, and Malcolm Todd – who guided this book from manuscript to publication, spotting our mistakes and inconsistencies, and responding to our innumerable queries, with patience and good humour. We are happy to thank the publishers whose dictionaries we have cited to illustrate points we are making: Houghton Mifflin Inc. for the American Heritage Dictionary; HarperCollins Publishers for Collins English Dictio- nary,theCobuild English Dictionary, and the Collins-Robert French Dic- tionary; Macmillan Publishers Ltd for the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners; Merriam Webster Inc. for the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and Webster’s Third New International Dictionary; Cambridge University Press for the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictio- nary; Pearson Education Ltd for the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the Longman Language Activator; and Oxford University Press for the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary,theOxford Dictionary of English,theOxford English Dictionary, and the Oxford-Hachette French Dictionary. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix We remember with gratitude the students of our MSc course at the University of Brighton, and everyone who has attended our Lexicom Work- shops over the years: we learned at least as much from them as they did from us, and the materials we developed in the process have now morphed into this book. Finally, a special thank you to Peter and Maggy, who have helped us through the book’s gestation with just the right mix of encouragement, support, and wry amusement that anyone should embark on such a project: this book is dedicated to them both. Abbreviations and symbols (a) Dictionary titles We include extracts from many different dictionaries at various points in the book. For the ones we refer to most frequently, we use the following abbreviations: AHD American Heritage Dictionary Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston MA, USA CALD Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK CED Collins English Dictionary HarperCollins Publishers, Glasgow, UK COBUILD Cobuild English Dictionary HarperCollins Publishers, Glasgow, UK CRFD Collins-Robert French Dictionary HarperCollins Publishers, Glasgow, UK LDOCE Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Pearson Education Ltd, Harlow, UK MED Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners Macmillan Publishers Ltd, Oxford, UK MWC Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary Merriam Webster Inc, Springfield MA, USA MW-3 Merriam-Webster Third International Dictionary Merriam Webster Inc, Springfield MA, USA OALD Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK ODE Oxford Dictionary of English Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK OED Oxford English Dictionary Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK OHFD Oxford-Hachette French Dictionary Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK References to these dictionaries indicate the edition referred to and its publication date. Thus AHD-4 (2000) refers to the 4th Edition of the American Heritage Dictio- nary, published in 2000. ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS xi (b) Use of the symbol In the Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography we provide practical suggestions at many points. These are introduced by the symbol. (c) Other Abbreviations BNC British National Corpus CQL corpus query language CQS corpus query software DTD document type definition DV defining vocabulary DWS dictionary writing system ECD Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary FE frame element FSD full-sentence definition HTML Hypertext Markup Language IPA International Phonetic Alphabet KWIC keyword in context LOB Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen corpus LU lexical unit MLD monolingual learners’ dictionary MWE multiword expression NC noun countable NLP natural language processing NP noun phrase NU noun uncountable OEC Oxford English Corpus OED Oxford English Dictionary PDF Portable Document Format POS part of speech PP prepositional phrase RTF Rich Text Format SL source language xii ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS TL target language V + O verb + object VP verb phrase WSD word sense disambiguation WYSIWYG what you see is what you get XCES XML Corpus Encoding Standard 1 Introduction 1.1 What this book is about 1 1.3 How this book works 5 1.2 What lexicographers do 2 1.4 And finally .