60. What are the main characteristics of Specialized dictionaries?

What monolingual and bilingual dictionaries do you know? Give the descriptions of these dictionaries.

Specialized lexicography is a branch of lexicography, and consequently, there is some overlap between the features of specialized dictionaries and those of general dictionaries. This section will briefly outline some of the characteristics of specialized dictionaries with a particular emphasis on those aspects that differ from general dictionaries. The characteristics that will be discussed here include subject coverage, language, intended users and purpose, macrostructure, microstructure, and medium.

Bilingual and monolingual dictionaries both have advantages. The chief advantages of a bilingual dictionary are its brevity and simplicity. In a bilingual dictionary, you can look up a word from the target language (the language you are learning), and you will see a direct translation for this word in your native language, without having to navigate text in the target language that you may not easily understand. This makes a bilingual dictionary quick and easy for a learner at any level to access. 

The main advantage of monolingual dictionaries is that they provide more comprehensive information about the target language. This information can include additional meanings of a target word, more examples of how the word is used in context, and, embedded in these examples, useful information about the grammatical behavior of the word. 

For example, in the monolingual entry for the adjective critical, below, we can see that critical has five distinct senses (=meanings), and there are multiple full-length example sentences illustrating how critical is used when it carries each of these senses. With these example sentences, idioms and collocations with the word critical are highlighted in bold, and explanations of their meanings are provided in brackets [ ]. In addition, the comparative ("more critical") and superlative ("most critical") forms of this adjective are shown at the beginning of each sense. However, it is important to emphasize that this material would not be appropriate for a beginning or intermediate reader of English. 

Finally there is, among English teachers, a belief that the process of using a monolingual dictionary aids a student’s process of second language acquisition. Not all teachers share this view, however.