A Corpus-based Approach to Lexicography: Towards a Thesaurus of English Idioms
Abstract
This paper deals with the principles of constructing a new ideographic dictionary of English idioms (DEI) based on corpus data. Idioms are arranged by their figurative meaning rather than alphabetically. The purpose of this paper is to explore English idioms along two revealing lines of inquiry. The first line of inquiry suggests constructing an ideographic dictionary (thesaurus) of English idioms; the second line illustrates advantages of organizing such a dictionary on an analysis of corpus data.
The need for a new dictionary of English idioms is motivated by the fact that at present there is no corpus-based dictionary of English idioms built on the thesaural principle. Ideographic description of idioms enables the reader to find the biggest possible amount of idiomatic word combinations of the language that expresses the given concept.
Due to corpus data, the dictionary presents a range of syntactic patterns, polysemous idioms and unexpected variants which cannot be retrieved from the existing idiomatic and monolingual dictionaries of the English language. Many dictionaries fail to register all meanings of idioms. The corpora help reveal the majority of meanings of polysemous idioms. Apart from its theoretic relevance as an instrument of description of the mental lexicon, a new ideographic dictionary can be used for the purposes of translation and language acquisition.
Session
Lexicography and Corpus Linguistics
Keywords
thesaurus; corpus-based; English idioms
BibTex
@InProceedings{ELX2016-037,
author={Guzel Gizatova},
title={A Corpus-based Approach to Lexicography: Towards a Thesaurus of English Idioms},
pages={348-354},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th EURALEX International Congress},
year={2016},
month={sep},
date={6-10},
address={Tbilisi, Georgia},
editor={Tinatin Margalitadze, George Meladze},
publisher={Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi University Press},
isbn={978-9941-13-542-2},
}
