Systematic Lexicography (Hardcover)

Lexicography and theoretical linguistics tend to ignore each other: lexicographers produce dictionaries, linguists grammars. As a result grammars and dictionaries are often discordant and sometimes glaringly incompatible. 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.