38. Dictionaries

There are many different types of Eng dictionaries. First of all they may be divided into two main groups: encyclopaedic (describe objects, phenomena, people.. and give information about them – the most popular Encyclopedia Britannica in 30 volumes and Enc Americana, Collier’s Enc, Enc International, World Book Enc) and linguistic(describe words, their origin and usage)

A linguistic dictionary is a book of words in a language usually listed alphabetically with pronunciation, definitions, etymologies and other linguistic information or with their equivalents in another language or languages.

Ling dictionaries may be classified according to different critera.

1. according to the nature of the world-list they devided into restricted and unrestricted. Restricted: phraseological, terminological dict., dict of new words, dialectal dict. Unrestricted contain lexical units from various spheres of life, they are general in the information they contain)

2. according the information given about each item. Two groups: general( presenting a wide range of data about the vocabulary items in ordinary use- explanatory dict. And translation dict.,) and specialized dict(restricting themselves to one particular aspect - dict of synonyms, collocations, of slang, usage dict, etymological dict, pronouncing dict, ideographic dict)

3. according to the lang in which information is given they may be monolingual, bilingual, polyglot

4.according to the intended user: learner’s dict and those designed for the general public.

39. Functional Styles

Functional Style is a system of interrelated language means serving a definite aim in communication. It is the coordination of the language means and stylistic devices which shapes the distinctive features of each style and not the language means or stylistic devices themselves.

The English literary system has evolved a number of styles easily distinguishable one from another.

They are:1) scientific style is employed in professional communication to convey some information. (brochures, articles, other scientific publications);

2) Official style is the most conservative one. It uses syntactical constructions and archaic words. Emotiveness is banned out of this style. (documents and papers);

3) Publicistic style is famous for its explicit pragmatic function of persuasion directed at influencing the reader in accordance with the argumentation of the author. (essay, public speech

4) Newspaper style – special graphical means are used to attract the readers attention. (mass media);

5) Belles-lettres style – the richest register of communication besides its own language means, other styles can be used besides informative and persuasive functions, belles-lettres style has a unique task to impress the reader. (genre of creative writing

Each of mentioned here styles can be expressed in two forms: written and oral.

40. Basic vocabulary

The basic vocabulary feature allows you to learn basic words in selected world language. The dictionary contains about 1700 meanings that were carefully selected with the help of word frequency lists to ensure that the dictionary contains only the basic keywords and most important meanings. The basic vocabulary is also divided into thematic groups. These groups like for example Color, Food, House, City, Clothes, Animal etc. make it even easier to memorize the basic words. The set of basic words contained in this dictionary covers close to 50% of communication in most languages because only the most frequently used words were selected for this dictionary. Language learners often think it is very hard to learn a foreign language because they do not know any words. Instead of learning the whole dictionary with tens of thousands of words it is very useful to learn this small set of basic meanings first.