Extralinguistic Features of the Macrostructure in English Linguistic Dictionaries

Abstract

The lexicographic practice of the past and present, the theoretical foundations of lexicographic science determine a fairly wide range of problems in contemporary linguistics that require their solution. One of the controversial issues is the opposition of encyclopaedic and linguistic dictionaries. In the theory linguistic and encyclopaedic dichotomy has rather clearly defined boundaries, but in practice it turns out to be quite difficult to establish where the definition of a word ends and the description of the concept that this word conveys begins. A number of researchers adhere to the opinion that modern English linguistic lexicography is characterised by the process of integration with encyclopaedic lexicography. And nowadays we witness the emergence of hybrid dictionaries which attempt to incorporate both types of information (linguistic and encyclopaedic) in their structure. This paper presents a study of English linguistic dictionary macrostructure with a particular emphasis on encyclopaedic component. It investigates how elements of encyclopaedic nature are interlaced with linguistic elements on the level of dictionary macrostructure. The obtained results show that the average rate of encyclopaedization at the level of the macrostructure of the English dictionaries reaches about 13% of the total. The analysis of the macrostructure revealed that the fundamental difference between linguistic and encyclopaedic dictionaries is in the methods of headwords selection. The macrostructure of the encyclopaedic dictionary is limited by its register as it does not include such parts of speech as adjectives, numerals, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions. Linguistic dictionary in opposition to encyclopaedic dictionary registers all parts of speech in its macrostructure. The results show that English linguistic lexicography tends to register both linguistic and encyclopaedic headwords in its macrostructure.