On the applicability of the dictionaries of Old English to linguistic research

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The aim of this article is to review the standard dictionaries of OldEnglish from the perspective of the evolution from traditional lexicography to electronic lexicography. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Bosworth and Toller 1973), The student's Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon (Sweet 1976), A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Hall 1996) and The Dictionary of Old English in Electronic Form A-G (Healey et al. 2008) are discussed with respect to headword, alternative spellings and cross-references, vowel quantity and textual evidence.Keywords: Lexicography, electronic lexicography, Old English, dictionary. 1 This research has been funded through the project FFI2014-59110 (MINECO), which is gratefully acknowledged. -VOLUME 15 (2017), 173-191. http Palabras clave: Lingüística histórica, inglés antiguo, lexicografía, morfología, sintaxis, semántica. JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES Received 22 December 2016 Revised version accepted 17 March 2017 INTRODUCTIONThis article deals with the lexicography of Old English. To be more precise, it engages in the development from traditional to electronic lexicography as witnessed by the most representative dictionaries in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies.Hanks (2012: 59-60) distinguishes four types of dictionaries: dictionaries of current usage for native speakers, bilingual dictionaries, dictionaries for foreign learners, and scholarly dictionaries on historical principles, the category to which dictionaries of Old English clearly belong. In the last two decades, two trends have become increasingly common to the edition of these four types of dictionaries, corpus compilation and computational processing. On corpus compilation, Granger and Paquot (2012: 15-16) remark that "for some time, lexicographers have been struggling with the constraints of print: with access to powerful corpus-querying software applied to billion-word corpora, we have the tools (and the data) to provide a fuller and more systematic account of how language works". Regarding computing, Kilgarriff and Kosem (2012: 31) state that with the advance of computer technology "compiling and storing corpora has become faster and easier, so corpora tend to be much larger than previous ones". At the same time, the reduction in the price of computers has contributed to the compilation of larger and more representative corpora. In Granger and Paquot's (2012: 18-19) words, "quite suddenly, a number of factors combined to make it possible, at relatively low cost, to collect, annotate, and store corpora measured in billions of words rather than millions". In order to explain the development of electronic lexicography, a third factor should be added to the development of corpus linguistics and the generalisation of computers, to wit, the spread of the Internet and the design of the hypertext and mark-up language protocols, which allow lexicographers not only to publish their products online but also to provide them with search options that turn the lexicographical work into a multifunctional database. According to Tarp (2012: 107)...

Electronic Filing System of Language Innovations in Media: Psycholinguistic Metric

“…The establishment of electronic fi ling system is dominant in modern lexicography, which is confi rmed by numerous publications in world peer-reviewed editions, using the example of English, Lithuanian and Polish languages (Rodríguez, 2017;Naktinienė, 2012;Majewska 2012 etc.). The innovativeness of the proposed web fi ling system is confi rmed by the fact that for the fi rst time in Ukrainian virtual * Blog hosting Google is free of charge which is provided by the company's policy and freely available [https://www.blogger.com/content.g?hl=en-GB].…”