The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography

B. T. Sue Atkins · Michael Rundell

Jun 2008 · OUP Oxford

About this ebook

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.

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About the author

Sue Atkins has worked as a lexicographer since 1966. She was General Editor of the first Collins-Robert English-French Dictionary series, co-designer of the Cobuild project and Lexicographic Adviser to Oxford University Press. She is currently Adviser to the FrameNet Project at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, California. Michael Rundell has worked as a lexicographer since 1980. As Managing Editor at Longman Dictionaries for over ten years, he was responsible for running major projects. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Macmillan family of learners' dictionaries. His books include the Wisden Dictionary of Cricket. Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell are two of the most experienced and respected teachers in their field. With their colleague Adam Kilgarriff, they make up the Lexicography MasterClass (www.lexmasterclass.com), providing consultancy services and running training workshops in lexicography and lexical computing.