2. Other dictionaries published in the usa

One of the best English dictionaries ever compiled was issued in 24 parts from 1889 to 1891 as “The Century Dictionary”, edited by William Dwight Whitney. It contained much encyclopaedic material but bears comparison even with the OED. The history of this dictionary dated back to John Ogilvie’s “The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language: A Complete Encyclopaedic Lexicon, Literary, Scientific and Technological on the Basis of Webster’s English Dictionary”, 2 volumes, London, 1847 – 1850. This work was noteworthy due to the following reasons:

1) encyclopaedic character of presenting material;

2) Webster’s Dictionary was taken as a starting point.

It should be noted that in 1823 Isaac Kauffman Funk brought out “A Standard Dictionary of the English Language”, its chief innovation being the giving of definitions in the order of their importance, not the historical order. Thus, at the turn of a new century, the US had four reputable dictionaries: Webster’s,Worcester’s (already becoming moribund), the Century, and Funk’s Standard.

A synchronic review of the language in the middle of the 20th century was presented by Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1967).

2. Problems of words choice

Different lexicographic parameters are reflected in specific language, lexicographic traditions and individual views of lexicographers.

The problem of choice is quite important in lexicography. Dictionaries are divided according to its information into:

extensive – i.e. maximum units, number and coverage;

reflective – i.e. restricting the choice of units due to the name of a dictionary.

The choice of words in a dictionary is based upon texts analyses, colloquial speech, patterns study plus individual experience of lexicographers.

The main problems of lexicography are dealt with the selection of headwords, the arrangement and contents of the vocabulary entry, the principles of sense definitions and the semantic and functional classification of words.

2. Problems of dictionary selecting.

First of all you ought to decide for what purpose you are in search of a dictionary, secondary you ought to bear in mind merits and drawbacks of any dictionary; thirdly 3 main factors should be taken into consideration such as: date of publication, dedication and editorial team.

Date of publication is quite essential and important factor for the given dictionary. Where should we find it? It’s indicated on the reverse side of the title page (in English editions). It’s important to differentiate between new edition and new reprinting. New edition is a version which has been revised and improved. New reprinting presupposes that it has been only reprinted without revision of the dictionary.

Dedication is meant for whom it is prepared. It must be explained explicitly in the foreword/introductory part often given dictionary for whom it’s designed, e.g. “Oxford Students Dictionary of Current English has been specially prepared for those learning English up to the intermediate level: for teachers of English, students, senior pupils.

Editorial team is no less important in selectiion of a dictionary. It means that the author’s group which has contributed to the making of the dictionary is very important, especially when names of prominent scientists, linguist are mentioned.

The initial stage of corpus linguistics

In 1950s there was a strong call for empirical, real language data. It was then that corpus was invented.

The first corpus was made out of a survey of English usage conducted by two universities, University of London andthe Brown University Corpus in Providence. In the 1960s, both compiled its million word corpusof written text from 500 reading passages, which was named Brown Corpus. This American corpus was a landmark in corpus linguistics since it was the first corpus to employ a computer in its making.

In 1982, the British version of the corpus, named the LOB corpus was compiled by Hofland and Johansson. LOB is an abbreviation from The Lancaster-Oslo-and Bergen, and as its name suggests it is a collaborative attempt between the three universities: the University of Lancster, the University of Oslo, and the University of Norwegian Computing Centre of the Humanities. However, both the Brown corpus and LOB corpus were deemed to be inadequate to sample English vocabulary. This gave birth to John Sinclair’s English Lexical Studies which specifically aimed to investigate vocabulary using an electronic text of spoken and written language.

The study gave prominence to collocation - words that naturally co-occur together. Aimed to represent varieties of English where it is used as a first or second language, Sidney Greenbaum compiled one-million-word corpora called The International Corpus of English in 1988. The unique feature of this corpus is that it samples more spoken language (60%) than its written counterpart (40%).

In the early 1990s, major universities and companies together compiled British National Corpus (BNC) containing 100 million words from 1980 up to 1993. The compilers were Oxford University Press, Longman, Chambers, the British Library, Oxford University and Lancaster University. The aim of the corpus is to provide a balanced corpus that represents British English. The corpus includes 10% spoken language and 90% written language, which comprises of 25% fiction and 75% non-fiction. One big distinction between BNC and Brown is that the former took samples from a longer piece of text between 40,000 and 50,000 words. This gives BNC an added advantage of being representative since text contains a different use of words at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end. Due to its sheer size, representativeness, and care, most British publishers prefer to make use of this corpus as their source of lexicographic information.

Corpus may have given a lot of contributions in language study, but its impact to lexicography did not start until 1989. Together with the advance of computer software, both have since contributed significantly to the development of lexicography. Since everything is automatedand recorded in a digital format, lexicographers can now save their time and the tremendous amount of work needed in compiling a dictionary.

Typically, a dictionary usually has information on the part of speech, usage, meaning, pronunciation, etymology of a word. Before the advent of corpora, all this information had to be gathered manually; lexicographers needed to do the hard labor of collecting slips of paper containing text that they intend to include in the dictionary. For this reason, it took roughly 50 years to complete Oxford English Dictionary, which was later known as New English Dictionary.

With corpora, dictionary makers can now usea large sample of authentic spoken and written text as a source to illustrate how each word in their list is used in real life. The citation used in dictionary comes from real-life discourse. Real contexts also provide accurate, well-defined lexical meanings in the definition of a word in dictionary, which is a huge improvement over the previous dictionary practice where words were defined using an unscientific manner. One huge improvement indictionary making is the rich information available for words that have many invariant meanings such as take, go, and time, which tend to be overlooked in the previous dictionary practice.

Another huge advantage of using corpora in lexicography is that information on word frequency can also be obtained. This way, lexicographers can assign whether a word is amongthe first 500 most common words, the next 500 and so on. Meyer notes that the most frequent words are functional words such as the, an, a, and, and of which carry little lexical meaning and the least frequent words are content words such as proper nouns.

The first dictionary to be founded wholly on corpus is Collins COBUILD series of English Language Dictionary compiled in 1987, guided by John Sinclair. The dictionary has its citation taken from real life discourse, and each word is defined from these authentic texts, instead of relying on previous dictionary. This entails using a very large corpus so that it may beable to include all lemmas including their word senses. However, this presents problem in that there tends to be an exclusion of rare words such as apothegm. Besides being the first corpus-based dictionary, COBUILD is innovative in that the definitions are akin to a classroom teacher explaining the words. For example in describing the word junk, it says: “You can use junk to refer to old and second-hand goods that people buy and collect”.

In the practice of dictionary-making, one crucial distinction has to be made between corpus-based dictionary and corpus-driven dictionary. Dictionaries such as Collins COBUILD series of English Language dictionaries are said to be corpus-driven if the corpus itself is used to validate information presented in the dictionary. However, if the corpus is used to extract the information used in the dictionary, it is called corpus-based. Teubert suggests that dictionary should follow corpus-driven approach so that it may complement standard linguistics and not just extend it.c.

Modern corpus linguistics

During the 1970s, computational research on English had not developed much in Birmingham because heavy preparation was spent towards devising software packages, instituting undergraduate courses and influencing opinions on the campus. Onthat time, when computing was almost restricted to a number of crises, there was a highlight forthe importance of data- processing. It has taken approximately fifty years to make a real improvement in the area of corpus- based linguistics which has been driven by systems that workand methodologies that can produce reasonable coverage of linguistic condition.

Years after years, there has been a realization of emergence on accessibility of computational resources such as fast machines and sufficient storage in order to process large volumes of data. Besides that, in the modern corpus, there is a growing availability of corporawith linguistics annotations, for example, part of speech, prosodic intonation, proper names, and bilingual parallel corpora. Furthermore, the maturity of computational linguistics technology has improved the commercial market for natural language product and the corpus linguistics nowadays has been equipped by efficient parsing and statistical techniques.

From 1980 to 1986, computational language was put to good effect which transformed into a completely new set of techniques for language observation, analysis, and recording. This is as well bringing to the development of editing substantial dictionaries by using technique and huge database of annotated examples.

One of the most prominent uses of a corpus in recent years is as a resource for lexicography. There was a corpus-based work for a small number of languages that was used in lexicography. Only recently the need for very large corpora has come to the front. The Lexicography and Natural Language Processing (NLP) collaboration has incited the use of corpora in dictionary projects that have had access to very large corpora. The role of the computer has a clerical role in lexicography which reducing the labor ofsorting and filing and examining very large amounts of English in a short time.

In the late 1970s, the prospects of computerized typesetting were growing more realistic. Ten years later, in the early 1980s, a multi-million word corpus became available for study but stilllimited. From simple tools, it has evolved to a substantial progress together with crucial, profound and basic linguistic generalizations. By these kinds of developed tools, they have revealed many topics for inquiry which have not been well explored by traditional linguistic methods.

In the modern era, the word has been reserved for collections of texts that are stored and accessed electronically. Electronic corpora are usually larger than the paper-based collections which are basically small, previously used to study the aspect of language.Thisis due to the capacity of computers that can store and process large amount of information compared to the previous time.

One of the work in the area of corpus linguistics is from the work done by Johansson and collegues in producing a parallel corpus of British English have made it possible for research workers to scrutinize and visualize physically texts of greater length compared to the timebefore. The main structural features of these corpora are:

- A classification into genres (15) of printed texts;

- A large number (500) of fairly short extracts (2000 words), giving a total of around one million words;

- A close to random selection of extracts within genres.

Due to this, a great amount of useful information can be extracted easily from the corpora. Besides that, many locations have samples of text which provide hundreds of billions of words. Many collections available such as Association for Computational Linguistics Data Collection Initiative (ACL/DCI), the European Corpus Initiative (ECI), ICAME, The British National Corpus (BNC), the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), the Consortium for Lexical Research (CLR), Electronic Dictionary Research (EDR), and standardization efforts such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) (Armstrong, 1994).

In relation towards the dictionary making, corpora have a contribution towards the area which is most far-reaching and influential. The use of corpora has changed dictionaries in a way that it has stressed on frequency, collocation and phraseology, variation, lexis in grammar and authenticity.

Recent innovations of dictionaries include the on-line Longman Web Dictionary and the Collins COBUILD English Collocations on CD ROM. Sinclair points out that the principles underlying corpus creation should be aslarge as possible including samples from a broad range of material in order to accomplish one way of representativeness to be anticipated with the technology of the time. The corpus should also be classified into different genres and even size.

Other relevant applications of corpora are to the production of dictionaries and grammars, in critical linguistics, translation, literary studies and stylistic, forensic linguistics and designing writer support packages.