Educational dictionaries of writers’ language

Abstract

The article deals with a range of issues related to such a type of dictionaries as educational dictionaries of writers’ language, or educational author’s dictionaries. The relevance of the research is determined by the factors which researchers define through the concepts of "reading culture crisis", "a decrease in students’ vocabulary size", and others. The material for the analysis was a corpus of educational dictionaries of writers’ language, including editions of the se cond half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century. The research relied on the methodology of lexicographic criticism based on the description, scientific evaluation, and a comparative study of dictionaries. The content and structural analysis of educational author’s dictionaries has shown that the main purpose of such dictionaries (namely to "explain the unclear") determines their strong affinity with defining and not other types of dictionaries. In terms of genre, they are complete explanatory dictionaries, dictionaries of difficult words (i. e. incomplete, similar to glossaries) as well as commentary dictionaries arranged as endnotes or in alphabetical order. At the same time, their word lists, dictionary entries, and description language generally correspond to the principles of educational lexicography although the specificity of the material being described relativises these principles. The study has shown that the general development of educational author’s lexicography started with dictionaries of difficult words which are now usually called dictiona ries of rare, obsolete words and the like and resulted in complete dictionaries of the language of one work. Moreover, an incomplete, as a rule of minuscule volume, educational author’s dictionary is most convenient to obtain information regarding the meaning of an unclear word and its main linguistic characteristics. A complete educational author’s dictionary is valuable when working with a literary text in its entirety. Russianists of different generations have contributed to the development of educational author’s lexicography. N. M. Shansky is one of them. For instance, he proposed a method for compiling line-by-line linguistic dictionary-type commentaries for particular works in the school syllabus. Commentary dictiona ries constitute an integral part of the modern corpus of educational author’s dictionaries.