Browsing by Subject "lexicography"

The present thesis is a philological study that describes Russian-English-Russian lexicographical works of the period between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century and concentrates on the most noteworthy English-Russian dictionaries. The aim of the thesis is to pay the intellectual debt to the compilers of English-Russian dictionaries of the period from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, whose works can be considered as inalienable parts of the evolution of the English-Russian lexicography. In total, eleven English-Russian and one Russian-English dictionaries are studied and described. The description of the dictionaries includes the information on the author(s), place and time of publishing, macro- and microstructures of the dictionaries, improvements and novelty as compared to their predecessors. The description of these dictionaries, their structural analysis and the research based on the related works on Russian bilingual lexicography allow to depict the gradual four centuries long process of English-Russian lexicography development. Throughout the evolution of the English-Russian lexicography, it is possible to see how the organization and presentation of word lists have become more uniform, and the amount of information provided for the user grew. A separate chapter is devoted to A. Alexandrow’s Complete English-Russian Dictionary (1891) that has been studied relatively little. Apart from depiction of the dictionary’s macro- and microstructures, transliteration patterns are illustrated, obsolete and archaic words, and lexemes that do not have a separate entry in the Oxford English Dictionary are demonstrated. The presence of these words has been verified against the dictionaries that are mentioned in the preface of Complete English-Russian Dictionary, namely Reiff’s New Parallel Dictionaries of the Russian, French, German and English Languages, Webster’s Complete Dictionary of the English Language and Nuttall’s Standard Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language. Additionally, Grammatin and Parenogo’s New Dictionary English and Russian and Banks’s Dictionary of the English and Russian Languages have been examined as the possible sources of these lexemes. The comparative analysis of these lexemes shows that despite their absence from the Oxford English Dictionary almost all words can be met in one or several well-known nineteenth century dictionaries. This paper illustrates the gradual evolution of the English-Russian lexicography and shows that despite their absence from the Oxford English Dictionary almost all words can be met in one or several dictionaries analysed.