1.

The Nature, Functions and Types of Lexicography

Lexicography is a scholarly discipline. In general term ‘Lexicography’ is derived from the

Greek word and means “writing of words”. It includes editing, writing, and compiling
dictionaries. The word dictionary itself was first used in 13 th century by john Garland. He
had written a book ”dictionarius” to help pupils learn Latin "diction" in the middle ages
when Latin was the lingua franca.. The earliest dictionaries in the English language were
glossaries of French, Spanish or Latin words along with their definitions in English.
There are different types of dictionaries and each of them serves different needs of the
society, it may be a book that gives you a different types of information on words, for
example: usage, pronunciation, etymology and so on. This is the store house function of a
dictionary.
The second function might be called court house function of a dictionary, which means that
dictionary gives you information about the proper usage of the word and it differs wrong
usage of the word from the good .
Dictionary also have clearing house function that means that the information in the
dictionary should be collected from many sources and be correct and easily understandable.
Lexicography is divided into two parts. Practical lexicography and theoretical lexicography.
The act of editing and writing dictionaries is practical lexicography, the description and
analysis of vocabulary of a concrete language and meanings that connects certain words to
each other in a dictionary is theoretical lexicography. Theoretical lexicography also includes
semantic and structural relationships of words and developing theories around it.
A lexicon is a vocabulary of a language or it can also be a branch of knowledge, for instance:
low or biological lexicon. Lexicon also points out the archive of lexemes , The term lexeme
comes from Greek and means word or speech lexemes are smallest components of a language
and are used to refer to a word with distinctive meaning and often this word has specific
cultural concept attached to it.
 2. The Main Stages of the Development of the European Lexicography;
Lexicography in Greece

Development of the lexicography in Europe first started in the middle ages when the Latin
was widely spread through out the Europe it basically was the lingua franca of Europe .
During this period there was mainly glosses of words in Latin manuscript , later this glosses
were sorted into alphabetical order , in this period many Latin glosses were compiled by
scholars because Latin was main language for scholarship , Christian religion and philosophy.

The first example that is known for us was 8th century glosses which contained around 5000
words . England also has an great example of such glossary called Promptarium Parvulorum
created by Galfridus Anglicus in 1440. It was consist of 10000 entries and they were copied
by hand. it was the only way back then cause printing machines were not invented yet.

Only in 1500 printing machine was invented by Gutenberg which made the huge change in
compiling the dictionaries , printing became available and it made possible to copy as many
scripts as wanted so dictionaries and glosses became available for anyone who could buy
them . after this lexicographic work became very popular because of the rise of national
languages such as French, Italian, and so on.

A major contribution in development of lexicography had Dr Samuel Johnson, he created a

dictionary called “A Dictionary of the English language” in less than 8 years. This was the
first scholarly description of English language, there are 114,000 quotations in the dictionary
and he’s method that greatly influenced the style of future dictionaries. The process of
making dictionaries continued and in 19th century Jacob Grimm and he’s brother created a
dictionary ‘Deutsches Worterbuch” helped by a hundred scholars. In 18 th-19th centuries
Oxford English Dictionary was created by Richard trench, more than 200 scholars and 2000
people participated in this work. Later online dictionaries were invented which made easier
the usage of the dictionaries for many people.

Dictionaries and glossaries were compiled and used from the early ages in Greece from 5 th
century BC and onwards. The earliest examples were insert glosses into manuscript copies of
the Homer and they were explaining unusual and ancient words to readers. As a result of
(Atticism) a new form of Greek lexicography appeared in the second century AD. The
precursors of this movement wanted to change some words which they considered as
incorrect or impure. A dictionary therefore needed that would present correct forms of
words.
 3. Treatment of Meaning and Equivalency

A dictionary is a book or electronic resource that lists the words of a language in the
alphabetical order and gives their meaning or gives the equivalent words in different language,
usually including meaning, pronunciation, and etymology too.
There are several types of dictionaries: explanatory dictionaries, monolingual ,dictionaries,
bilingual dictionaries, etc.
Explanatory dictionary and monolingual dictionary are usually meant for the native speakers
of the language. Monolingual dictionaries give additional information (pronunciation,
meaning, etymology and explanations in the same language. Bilingual also known as a
translation dictionaries are used to translate words or phrases from one language to another
and this type of dictionary is very important for language learners, also they provide
equivalents.
What is equivalency? Equivalency indicates the relationship between words from two or
more languages which have the same meaning. For example a word Rough (უხეში)
The definition of the English word ‘rough’ emphasizes that surface is not smooth, it is
uneven, harsh to touch and so on.
But in Georgian this word have many different definitions for example
Rough road - ოღროჩოღრო გზა
Rough edges - უსწორმასწორო კიდეები
Rough skin - ხორკლიანი კანი and so on.
Lexical meanings of words contains denotatum and designatum. Denotatum implies different
concrete meanings of an actually existing object referred to by a word, sign, or linguistic
expression. Designatum is something that is referred to by a word, sign, or linguistic
expression, the class of objects referred to by a sign, whether actually existing or not.
So complexity of meaning makes it harder to develop equivalency while compiling a
dictionary.
In the late 19th century Traditional lexicographic practice regarded word meaning with the
same way and analytically defined the words by breaking them down into more basic
semantic components. The methodology of defining meaning on the one hand described
hyponymy and differential features of meaning, on the other hand described supplementary
features of meaning, which served as the basis for the development of transferred meanings
of polysemous words and were the basis of metaphor, metonymy and other mechanisms of
semantic change.
 4.The Principles of Forming a Word-entry in a Dictionary: Spelling,
Transcription, Polysemy;

A dictionary is a book or electronic resource that lists the words of a language in the
alphabetical order and gives their meaning. When compiling a dictionary , correct principles
of forming a word-entry is very important.

A typical dictionary entry should include : spelling of a word, Grammatical characterization

of a word, transcription of a word , different forms of a word , the correct definition of a
word or a phrase, also the origin of a word and so on.

The word entry usually starts with the description of the spelling of a word, which is much
needed for English, cause English words have a different variation for writing and often
different options of spelling. Writing options is separated by a comma or word “or”.

Transcription is essential because often especially in English language written word and it’s
pronunciation is completely different from each other. Transcription is also presented in
modern (online) dictionaries, it is usually written in square brackets . Italian and French as
well as Georgian language do not need transcription because they all have clear rules of
reading. But in the studying dictionaries even this languages may have transcription to help
language learners.

The next very important thing in forming a word-entry is a grammatical characterisation of a

word. It tells us if word is noun, verb, adjective and so on. In some languages the gender
should also be indicated for example: in French.

Polysemy is when a form of a word has more than one meaning ,thus it has many related
senses for example: CHAIR .n

First meaning may be - a seat for a person that has a back , two arms and four lags

Second meaning is official position of a person in charge of organization.

Third meaning is the position of a person in charge of university or college department.

I should mention that English has a large stock of words so it is free of polysemy unlike many
other languages. Its also worth to mention that English polysemy can be influenced by
metaphor. A metaphor is an imaginative manner of describing something by referring to
something else which is the same in a particular way.
For example, if you want to say that someone is very strong you might say that they are like
a bull.

5.The Principles of Forming a Word-entry in a Dictionary: Homonymy,

Qualifications

A dictionary is a book or electronic resource that lists the words of a language in the
alphabetical order and gives their meaning. When compiling a dictionary , correct principles
of forming a word-entry is very important.

A typical dictionary entry should include : spelling of a word, Grammatical characterization

of a word, transcription of a word , different forms of a word , the correct definition of a
word or a phrase, also the origin of a word and so on.

Homonyms are words which have different meaning and origin but same pronunciation and
spelling. For example – pink
1. pink from Dutch origin means a sailing vessel
2. pink from German origin means a young salmon
when we are talking about word-entry one of the most important things are qualifiqations.
We have different types of qualifications: temporal, local and stylistic.
Temporal qualification shows if word is archaic, outdated or rarely used in the modern
language. In English dictionaries there are many types of qualifications: old-fashioned,
obsolete, dated and so on.
Local qualification is very important in English language. As we know there are many
variants of English – British, American, Australian, New Zealand also we should add
Canadian and south African as they are official languages too.
Local qualifications are important for the French language and also for the Spanish language
as they are official languages in many countries.
Stylistic qualifications – as it is known English vocabulary is stylistically coloured. Some
words are typical only for the colloquial speech while others for the bookish style, we also
have neutral words.
Colloquial vocabulary contains word classes such as 1) general colloquial vocabulary; 2)
slang; 3) jargon; 4)dialects; 6) vulgarisms; 7) colloquial neologisms.
The bookish vocabulary contains 1) general literary words 2) terms; 3) poetic words; 4)
archaisms; 5)foreign words and borrowings; 6) neologisms and occasional words.

6. The Comprehensive English-Georgian Online Dictionary

The first bilingual Georgian-Italian dictionary was compiled by Stefano Paolini with the help
of the Georgian diplomat Niceforo Irbachi and published in Rome in 1629. Between 17th and
19th centuries almost ten European-Georgian and Georgian-European dictionaries were
compiled.
The idea for the creation of the dictionary was developed in the 1960s at the Department of
English Philology at the university on the initiative of professor Givi Gachechiladze. There
were lack of an academic dictionaries so they were needed. Since then dictionary work has
gone though many difficult phases, mistakes were made mainly because because the English
specialists and teachers participating in the project needed knowledge of lexicography.
In 1992 the editorial team decided to begin publishing the dictionary in letter-by-letter
fascicles. The edition of the comprehensive English-Georgian dictionary was published, the
letter a, which was soon followed by two more additions b and c.
In 2009, the Editorial Committee made the decision to develop and publish an online version
of the dictionary It on the internet. In 2010 the dictionary was published on the internet, to
say more about that this dictionary also includes numerous collocations, phrase verbs,
different kind of terms and so on.
At the beginning of 19th century Georgia become part of the Russian empire, a fact which
affected the status of Georgian bilingual lexicography. In the 19th century important
bilingual dictionaries were created, mainly Russian-Georgian and Georgian-Russian ones.
French-Georgian dictionaries also belong to this period, reflecting considerable interest of
Georgian nobility in the French language.
It should be noted that dictionaries which were made in 17th ant 18th centuries were created
by foreigners but in the 19th century most of them were made by Georgian authors.
Consequently, the English-Georgian Online Dictionary is primarily intended for English
language specialists, teachers, translators and specialists from various fields, who have to
work on special terms; the Dictionary is also intended for learners of English in general, as
well as for the individuals, interested in English.
 7. Corpus Linguistics; Georgian Corpora;

Corpus linguistics is a sub-discipline of linguistics, it is one of the most developing and

growing methodologies in today’s linguistics ,it looks at language from a social perspective
an. The term corpus linguistics first appeared in 1980s , corpus is a collection of words and
their definitions , we can say that corpus linguistics have been existing around a century.

Lexicographers have been collecting examples of a language in use to help accurately define
words since at least the late 19th century. Before computers, these examples were written on
papers. First computer-based corpus the Broun corpus was created in 1961 and comprised
about 1 million words.

Corpus linguistics approaches the study of a language in use though corpora. A corpus is a
large collection of naturally occurring examples of a language stored electronically.

John Sinclair is considered one of the most influential scholar of modern-day corpus
linguistics. He said that a word in and of itself doesn’t carry meaning but it has meaning in
context.

German professor Jost Cipper created the first electronic resources for the Georgian
language. He collaborated with Georgian scholars while creating Georgian corpora. The
Georgian national corpus is comprehensive corpus of the Georgian language covering all
stages of its historical development. there is a important fact that Georgian national corpus
combines the work of scholars and students of Tbilisi state university. They generally
worked on two fields digitalization of Georgian literary monuments and annotation of
already-existed texts. Annotation is the act of adding explicit information to a corpus.
Different types of information can be added: textual, such as part of speech information,
syntactic annotation , semantic annotation etc;

8. Corpus Linguistics; Different Types of Corpora

Corpus linguistics is a sub-discipline of linguistics, it is one of the most developing and

growing methodologies in today’s linguistics ,it looks at language from a social perspective
an. The term corpus linguistics first appeared in 1980s , corpus is a collection of words and
their definitions , we can say that corpus linguistics have been existing around a century.
Lexicographers have been collecting examples of a language in use to help accurately define
words since at least the late 19th century. Before computers, these examples were written on
papers. First computer-based corpus the Broun corpus was created in 1961 and comprised
about 1 million words.

Corpus linguistics approaches the study of a language in use though corpora. A corpus is a
large collection of naturally occurring examples of a language stored electronically.

John Sinclair is considered one of the most influential scholar of modern-day corpus
linguistics. He said that a word in and of itself doesn’t carry meaning but it has meaning in
context.

There are different types of corpora:

1) general corpora- General corpora' consist of general texts, texts that do not belong to a
single text type or subject field. An example of a general corpus is the British National
Corpus.

2) A Specialized corpora – contain texts from a particular genre or register or a specific time
or context. Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English and the Michigan Corpus of
Academic Spoken English are the popular examples of specialized corpora.

3)comparable corpora – two or more corpora constructed along similar parameters. But each
containing different language or a different variety of the same language.

4)parallel corpora – almost like comparable corpora but main difference is that user can view
all the examples in one language and all the translations of this example in other language.

5)Historical also known as a diachronic corpora - is containing texts from different periods
and is used to study the development or change in language. The most famous diachronic
corpora are the Helsinki Corpus with 1.5-million words and the ARCHER with 1.7 million
words .

6)A monitor corpora - is used to monitor the change in language. It is a corpus which is
regularly updated, new texts are added as they are produced.

7)The final ones are the Heterogeneric and Monogeneric corpora - Heterogenic corpora
contain texts of many different types, generally as many different types as the compilers can
practically and legally get. However monogenic corpora easy to compile and created by
individual researchers with a special interest in a particular text-type.