This book unites lexicography with theoretical linguistics. The two fields tend to ignore each other: lexicographers produce dictionaries, linguists grammars. As a result grammars and dictionaries are often discordant and sometimes glaringly incompatible. In Systematic Lexicography Juri Apresjan shows the insights linguistics has to offer lexicography, and equally that the achievements and challenges of lexicography provide a rewarding field for linguistic inquiry. The author presents the vocabulary of a language as a complicated system reflecting a specific view of the world. He does so within an integrated theory of language, in which grammatical and lexical meanings, and the conceptualizations underlying them, blend and interact. Each lexeme, he argues, is a point of intersection of various lexicographic types classes of lexemes with shared semantic, syntactic, pragmatic or mental properties, that are sensitive to the same rules, and which should thus be uniformly described in the dictionary. When any lexeme is viewed against the whole set of linguistic rules, new facets emerge, and these reveal, he shows, key characteristics of words that dictionaries do not currently record. Professor Apresjan not only presents an original, unified theory of language, inspired by the Moscow school of semantics. He also works out its consequences and describes the problems he faced in applying it to the description of Russian. The reader will find that travelling with the author through Russian semantic space is both enlightening and entertaining. The books wealth of lexical facts, illuminated by systematic thought, give it unique character and importance: it will be of great interest to theoretical linguists and to all concerned with writing of dictionaries as well as to semanticists and students of Russian.

Michael P. Theophilos explores the fascinating variety of numismatic contributions to Greek lexicography, pertaining to lexicographic studies of the Second Temple period in general, and the New Testament in particular. Theophilos considers previous scholarly attempts to grapple with, and incorporate, critical numismatic material into the emerging discipline of Greek lexicography - including foundational work by F. Preisigke and E. Kiessling - before outlining his own methodological approach. Theophilos' then examines the resources available for engaging with the numismatic material, and presents a series of specific case studies throughout the New Testament material. His carefully annotated images of coins draw readers in to a greater understanding of the material culture of the Greco-Roman world, and how this impacted upon the Greek language and the New Testament.

Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest sets out to explore the pioneering endeavours in both lexicography and lexicology which led to the making of the first English dictionary published by Oxford. Deliberately conceived as a new departure in English lexicography, the first OED, as James Murray stressed, was to be founded on an unequivocal return to first principles, both in the nature of its construction and in the evidence amassed for its compilation. It also produced, as this book shows, a host of problems: on the nature of Englishness, correctness, and general standards of language use, as well as in aspects of pronunciation, semantics, and syntax. Often making use of previously unpublished archive material, this collection of twelve essays provides both a range of perspectives from which the dictionary can be approached, and also explores the particular problems posed by the attempt to realize the pioneering acts of lexicography integral to the making of the dictionary.

This is a state-of-the-art Guide to the fascinating world of the lexicon and its description in various types of dictionaries. A team of experts brings together a solid Introduction to Lexicography and leads you through decision-making processes step-by-step to compile and design dictionaries for general and specific purposes. The domains of lexicography are outlined and its specific terminology is explained in the Glossary. Each chapter provides ample suggestions for further reading. Naturally, electronic dictionaries, corpus analysis, and database management are central themes throughout the book. The book also "introduces" questions about the many types of definition, meaning, sense relations, and stylistics. And that is not all: those afraid to embark on a dictionary adventure will find out all about the pitfalls in the chapters on Design. A Practical Guide to Lexicography introduces and seduces you to learn about the achievements, unexpected possibilities, and challenges of modern-day lexicography.