An Author’s Contrastive Dictionary as an Experimental Lexicographical Form

Abstract

At the turn of the 21st century, a new trend appeared in lexicographic practice. It was named contrastive lexicography. Contrastive dictionaries proved useful first of all as necessary reference books in learning and teaching foreign languages, and translating. In another domain, folklore lexicography, contrastive dictionaries became dictionary projects of linguafolklorists from Kursk, Russia. The method of comparative description tested on the folk material was applied to the literary text. This led to the idea of creating an author’s contrastive dictionary. The poetry by Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet was chosen as the material of the tentative dictionary. The article describes the stages of the dictionary compilation and its original micro- and macro-structure. An essential macrostructural issue of the dictionary is the choice of words and the order of entries. It is accentuated that the topical, not alphabetic, structure of the dictionary enables to reveal the consistency and the inner hierarchy of single fragments of the poetic world picture and helps to identify their place in the poets’ idiolects. The authors of the dictionary employed the cluster approach. The cluster is understood as a group words which belong to different parts of speech and are linked semantically, functionally and derivationally. The dictionary comprises eight clusters which represent three massive fragments: World of Nature, World of Human and World’s Characteristics. Special attention is paid to dictionary entries of a double unit type. If an entry contains no comparative part, the unit turns into a left- or right-sided “lacuna” type entry. For poetic language description, the authors of the dictionary used the parameter structure of a dictionary entry; this structure comprises compulsory and optional components. The syntagmatic zone of a dictionary entry, which reflects all textual word links within the poetic line and the neighboring lines, was thoroughly analyzed. The research potential of an author’s contrastive dictionary is illustrated by several examples. It is noted that this dictionary is experimental and there are prospects for contrastive dictionaries of different genres, in line with the trends of modern author’s lexicography. Contrastive dictionaries are concluded to be of use in studying the author’s idiolect and in revealing the compared writers’ language uniqueness.