Abstract
This article deals with the inclusion and treatment of scientific and technical vocabulary in the third, fourth and eighth editions of Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary . The comparison of these editions is based on a random sample of 50 pages from OALD8 from the lemma foot to gimmick . The same lemma range was also studied in OALD3 and OALD4. First, different ways of indicating terminology were identified: i.e., subject-field labels, definitions and short cuts. Then all the lemmata or their senses marked with a subject-field label were found and a list of all subject-field labels used in this lemma range was compiled to see similarities and differences between individual editions. The comparison showed that the number of subject-field labels in all three editions is almost identical, but the subject-field labels differ from edition to edition. The issue of overly specific labels (e.g., 'anatomy', 'phonetics') and labels that are too broad (e.g., 'science', 'technical') is addressed. The next part of the article is devoted to the changes in the treatment of LSP lexical items in these three editions of OALD, from missing labels to changes in labels and ways of indicating terminology by means of definitions and/or short cuts. The conclusion suggests improvements in the subject-field labels themselves, a more consistent way of including subject-field labels even when the definitions indicate the subject field and an improved use of short cuts when the reference is to a certain subject field.
Highlights
General dictionaries, be they mono- or bilingual, are primarily concerned with general vocabulary and are consulted more often by users than any other type of dictionary
Our analysis focuses on the 3rd, the 4th and the 8th editions, because our aim was to observe the developments concerning inclusion and treatment of terminology from the relatively old OALD3 (published in 1974 and referred to as a dictionary belonging to the second generation of learner's dictionaries by Cowie (1999: 82, 97-105)) to OALD4 (published in 1989, referred to as a dictionary belonging to the third generation of learner's dictionaries by Cowie (1999: 144, 148-151)) and to the most recent edition: OALD8
We examined the definitions, sense indicators and short cuts to see whether they are used to indicate specific subject fields
Summary
Be they mono- or bilingual, are primarily concerned with general vocabulary and are consulted more often by users than any other type of dictionary. The users of general dictionaries expect to find in them different pieces of information, such as definitions, translation equivalents, spelling, pronunciation, fixed word combinations, collocations, usage notes, grammatical information, information on word-division, etymology and register. They should be distinguished from LSP dictionaries, which include and treat the terminology of various specialist fields. As far as the treatment of lemmata is concerned, enormous differences can be observed between general and LSP dictionaries. General dictionaries usually include technical terms, those that everyone can encounter in everyday life, but LSP dictionaries, as a rule, do not include words used in general language only (cf. Svensén 2009: 3)
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