The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography


Book Description

This comprehensive introduction by two of the world's leading lexicographers presents a course in dictionary-making for publishers, colleges, and universities world-wide. The book takes readers through building a corpus, analysing the data, and writing entries. Numerous exercises show the use of software to manipulate data and compile entries.




The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography


Book Description

This is a down-to-earth, 'how to do it' textbook on the making of dictionaries. Written by professional lexicographers with over seventy years' experience between them, the book presents a step-by-step course for the training of lexicographers in all settings, including publishing houses, colleges, and universities world-wide, and for the teaching of lexicography as an academic discipline. It takes readers through the processes of designing, collecting, and annotating a corpus of texts; shows how to analyse the data in order to extract the relevant information; and demonstrates how these findings are drawn together in the semantic, grammatical, and pedagogic components that make up an entry. The authors explain the relevance and application of recent linguistic theories, such as prototype theory and frame semantics, and describe the role of software in the manipulation of data and the compilation of entries. They provide practical exercises at every stage. The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography draws on materials developed by the authors over more than twenty years of teaching courses for publishing houses and universities in the US, Japan, Hong Kong and China, South Africa, Australia, the UK, and Europe. It will be welcomed everywhere by lexicographers, teachers of lexicography, and their students. It is also fascinating reading for all those interested in discovering how dictionaries are made.




The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography


Book Description

This volume provides concise, authoritative accounts of the approaches and methodologies of modern lexicography and of the aims and qualities of its end products. Leading scholars and professional lexicographers, from all over the world and representing all the main traditions andperspectives, assess the state of the art in every aspect of research and practice. The book is divided into four parts, reflecting the main types of lexicography. Part I looks at synchronic dictionaries - those for the general public, monolingual dictionaries for second-language learners, andbilingual dictionaries. Part II and III are devoted to the distinctive methodologies and concerns of the historical dictionaries and specialist dictionaries respectively, while chapters in Part IV examine specific topics such as description and prescription; the representation of pronunciation; andthe practicalities of dictionary production. The book ends with a chronology of the major events in the history of lexicography. It will be a valuable resource for students, scholars, and practitioners in the field.




A Practical Guide to Lexicography


Book Description

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.




The Oxford Guide to Treaties


Book Description

This guide is an authoritative reference point for anyone interested in the creation or interpretation of treaties and other forms of international agreement. It covers the rules and practices surrounding their making, interpretation, and operation, and uses hundreds of real examples to illustrate different approaches treaty-makers can take.




A Handbook of Lexicography


Book Description

This book provides a systematic survey of the theory and methods of dictionary-making (including the linguistic background): what types of dictionary there are, how different kinds of information are dealt with when compiling dictionaries, how this information is presented to users, and how dictionaries are actually used. It refers throughout to both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, giving a full account of the writing of definitions as well as of the selection and presentation of equivalents. The treatment of other types of information provided in dictionaries - such as pronunciation, inflection, constructions, collocations and idioms - is described systematically in individual chapters. The book also discusses dictionary structure, illustrations, the collection and selection of material, the management of dictionary projects, law and ethics in lexicographic work, and dictionary criticism. As well as looking at print lexicography, the author discusses the role of the Web, electronic corpora, electronic dictionaries, and compilation software used in dictionary-making. This is an important and practical guide to contemporary lexicography, designed for lexicographers, language students and teachers, translators and academics.




The Oxford Handbook of Reading


Book Description

Writing is one of humankind's greatest inventions, and modern societies could not function if their citizens could not read and write. How do skilled readers pick up meaning from markings on a page so quickly, and how do children learn to do so? The chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Reading synthesize research on these topics from fields ranging from vision science to cognitive psychology and education, focusing on how studies using a cognitive approach can shed light on how the reading process works. To set the stage, the opening chapters present information about writing systems and methods of studying reading, including those that examine speeded responses to individual words as well as those that use eye movement technology to determine how sentences and short passages of text are processed. The following section discusses the identification of single words by skilled readers, as well as insights from studies of adults with reading disabilities due to brain damage. Another section considers how skilled readers read a text silently, addressing such issues as the role of sound in silent reading and how readers' eyes move through texts. Detailed quantitative models of the reading process are proposed throughout. The final sections deal with how children learn to read and spell, and how they should be taught to do so. These chapters review research with learners of different languages and those who speak different dialects of a language; discuss children who develop typically as well as those who exhibit specific disabilities in reading; and address questions about how reading should be taught with populations ranging from preschoolers to adolescents, and how research findings have influenced education. The Oxford Handbook of Reading will benefit researchers and graduate students in the fields of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, education, and related fields (e.g., speech and language pathology) who are interested in reading, reading instruction, or reading disorders.




The Oxford Handbook of the American Congress


Book Description

No legislature in the world has a greater influence over its nation's public affairs than the US Congress. The Congress's centrality in the US system of government has placed research on Congress at the heart of scholarship on American politics. Generations of American government scholars working in a wide range of methodological traditions have focused their analysis on understanding Congress, both as a lawmaking and a representative institution. The purpose of this volume is to take stock of this impressive and diverse literature, identifying areas of accomplishment and promising directions for future work. The editors have commissioned 37 chapters by leading scholars in the field, each chapter critically engages the scholarship focusing on a particular aspect of congressional politics, including the institution's responsiveness to the American public, its procedures and capacities for policymaking, its internal procedures and development, relationships between the branches of government, and the scholarly methodologies for approaching these topics. The Handbook also includes chapters addressing timely questions, including partisan polarization, congressional war powers, and the supermajoritarian procedures of the contemporary Senate. Beyond simply bringing readers up to speed on the current state of research, the volume offers critical assessments of how each literature has progressed - or failed to progress - in recent decades. The chapters identify the major questions posed by each line of research and assess the degree to which the answers developed in the literature are persuasive. The goal is not simply to tell us where we have been as a field, but to set an agenda for research on Congress for the next decade. The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics are a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics. Each volume focuses on a particular aspect of the field. The project is under the General Editorship of George C. Edwards III, and distinguished specialists in their respective fields edit each volume. The Handbooks aim not just to report on the discipline, but also to shape it as scholars critically assess the scholarship on a topic and propose directions in which it needs to move. The series is an indispensable reference for anyone working in American politics. General Editor for The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics: George C. Edwards III




The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics


Book Description

Some of the world's specialists provide in this handbook essays about what kinds of things there are, in what ways they exist, and how they relate to each other. They give the word on such topics as identity, modality, time, causation, persons and minds, freedom, and vagueness.




Practical Lexicography


Book Description

This is the first book to give a full and readable account of how dictionaries are made. It is both a general introduction to lexicography and a systematic guide to lexicographic methods. Included are sections on treatment of pronunciation, inflection, constructions, collocations, and idioms; the structure of entries and their arrangement in a dictionary; and the planning, execution, and monitoring of a dictionary project. Practical Lexicography demonstrates how both one-language and two-language dictionaries are written, the ways in which materials are selected, arranged, and explained, and how computers have revolutionized the making of dictionaries.