B. T. Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell. The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography.

Abstract

The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography, the first, detailed, step-by-step guide to English lexicography, fully embraces the use of a computerized language corpus to analyze linguistic data and compose dictionary entries. It is written by B. T. Sue Atkins, a distinguished corpus linguist and bilingual lexicographer, and Michael Rundell, a leading editor of dictionaries for foreign learners. He has also written a dictionary of cricket. Both authors have many years of experience and have collaborated with Adam Kilgarriff in teaching English lexicography, as few others have done. Thus they are eminently well qualified to write this guide. In addition, Atkins has long been associated with Charles Fillmore in the development of frame semantics, which informs the discussion of various aspects of grammatical analysis in some chapters of this book. It is thus a welcome addition to the store of basic sources of information for the would-be or working lexicographer. The experience of the authors, though deep, does not range over the broad spectrum of dictionary types. They are thoroughly familiar with the leading British monolingual dictionaries for native speakers, much less so with American dictionaries. Some of the examples given are of British English and would confound speakers of other varieties. Their guide applies mainly to ESL/EFL dictionaries (hereafter, for brevity, called ESL dictionaries) and to bilingual dictionaries – admittedly very large and vibrant areas of lexicography, but not the whole of it. That said, even lexicographers working in other branches of the field could certainly profit from parts of this guide.