2007-10-30

Summaries

1. Two types of dictionaries:

- Semasiological dictionary (also named reader's dictionary or decoding dictionary): in such a dictionary, one may look up the new words he doesn't know the meaning or the usage;

- Onomasiological dictionary (also named writer's dictionary or encoding dictionary): namely, this kind of dictionary is usually applied by a writer, who needs the information about more words that have the same or similar meaning of the known word.

2. Structures of A Dictionary

A dictionary is composed of four parts: Megastructure, Macrostructure, Mesostructure and Microstructure.

2.1 The megastructure of a dictionary is the entire structure of the dictionary, including
– the front matter, e.g. contents, instruction;
– abbreviations and explanations of grammar, e.g. adj.=adjective;
– the body of the dictionary, e.g. Adam ['aedem]n.(in the Bible) the first man;
– the back matter, e.g. the irregular verbs.

2.2 The macrostructure of a dictionary is the organisation of the lexical entries in the body of a dictionary into lists, tree structures, and networks.
Two types of macrostructure:
– semasiological: more like tree structures
– onomasiological: more like lists (Both of them are networks.)

2.3 The microstructure of a dictionary is the consistent organisation of lexical information within lexical entries in the dictionary. This structure shows the properties of linguistic units such as words:

For example: what's the microstructure of "antiestablishmentarialism"?

According to the rules of morphology, the word could be divided into 5 parts: "anti-", "establish", "-ment", "arial", "-ism". But in terms of the rules of content, only three parts can be gained: "anti-", "establishment", and "arialism".

2.4 The mesostructure of a dictionary is the set of relations between lexical entries and other entities such as other parts of a dictionary or a text corpus. In another word, it's mainly about links, e.g. hypernym, hyponym, antonym, synonym, inflection, conjugation, etc. Here's another example:

Anyway, the mesostructure of a dictionary or lexicon mesostructure is about links between different kinds of information:

– Links between groups of lexical information types:
● modality
● grammar
● object semantics
– Abbreviations for parts of speech
● link to mini-grammar
– Links between related entries
● co-hyponyms (synonyms, antonyms, ...)
● i.e. cross-references
– References to text corpora (concordance function)
● i.e. examples, data

If we detail a dictionary entry in a table, the lexicon mesostructure would be the follows:

Above all, we get an overall view of a dictionary architecture:

All above are quoted from the notes of the lecture given by Dr. Gibbon.

1. What is the megastructure and macrostructure of a lexicon? Give examples.

A: See to summaries.

2. What is a semasiological and onomasiological dictionary? Give examples.

A: See to summaries.

Evaluation

Obviously, this lecture is quite an important one, as structure is the basic components of making a dictionary. However, it's not easy to grasp, since there're too many glossaries.

References

• Gibbon, Dafydd. "Archetecture." 29.10.2007. University of Bielefeld. 30.10.2007 <http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/~gibbon/Classes/Classes2007WS/HTMD/htmd03-architecture-v01.pdf>.