| Abstract |
In this paper, we discuss systematic approaches to the lexicon representation in bilingual dictionaries. For empirical data we take how possessive pronouns are treated in the New Comprehensive German-Russian Dictionary (NCGRD). Every type of pronouns builds a closed class of words, and its members have to be described in the same terms and in the same format. In the ideal case, each deviation from lexicographic uniformity must be understood as a signal that a given word displays unique linguistic features as compared to other members of the same class. An additional difficulty is that the German and the Russian pronoun systems are arranged according to non-identical principles. Therefore, every German possessive pronoun can be translated into Russian not only by its 'regular' equivalent (мой, твой, его etc.), but also by the pronoun свой, under certain syntactic and discursive conditions. These conditions have to be explicitly stated in the entry. There are also contexts where a given German possessive pronoun has to be omitted in the Russian translation, cf. hast du (dir) deine Hände schon gewaschen? - ты уже вымыл руки?; hast du schon mit deiner Mutter gesprochen? - ты уже поговорил с матерью? This phenomenon clearly depends on the semantic class of the noun modified by the pronoun in question, i.e. it is rule-governed; these rules need to be declared in the lexicographic description. The pronoun mein in certain contexts must be translated not by мой 'my' but by наш 'our' ; cf. meine Fakultät - наш факультет. The reason is that the Russian word мой 'my', being different from the German word mein, denotes exclusive possession, i.e. мой means 'mine and only mine'. All these cases will be illustrated by entries from NCGRD. They demonstrate far-reaching uniformity, so that every deviation from the uniform format-as compared to both various possessive pronouns in German and their Russian equivalents- is a meaningful constituent of their lexicographic representation. |
| BibTex |
@InProceedings{ELX08-076,
author = {Dmitrij O. Dobrovol'skij, Artëm V. Šarandin},
title = {Systemhaftigkeit in zweisprachiger Lexikographie: Zur Darstellung deutscher und russischer Possessivpronomen},
pages = {837-842},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th EURALEX International Congress},
year = {2008},
month = {jul},
date = {15-19},
address = {Barcelona, Spain},
editor = {Elisenda Bernal, Janet DeCesaris},
publisher = {Institut Universitari de Linguistica Aplicada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra},
isbn = {978-84-96742-67-3},
} |
