GERMAN DICTIONARY OF MIKHAIL LOMONOSOV: PROJECT OUTCOMES

Abstract

From 2009 to 2020 researchers from St Petersburg State University and the Institute of Linguistic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences have been working on a project to create a dictionary of German-language texts by Mikhail Lomonosov. The basic principle of the dictionary implies the complete coverage of lexicon, regardless of the status and frequency of individual words. One of the major tasks of the dictionary is to demonstrate the personality of Lomonosov as a thinker and creator, who was fluent in several languages, using linguistic material. M. V. Lomonosov’s German dictionary is a bilingual dictionary that provides a lexicographic description of words belonging to texts of different genres (letters, business documents, scientific and educational texts). The structure of dictionary entries includes extensive historical, sociolinguistic, biographical comments. The material of Lomonosov’s German-language texts made it possible to reveal a number of linguistic facts that characterize the nuances of the functioning of individual words within his idiolect, including nouns in the role of addresses, proper names (anthroponyms, toponyms, ideonyms), verbs, functional words and abbreviations. These facts include the frequency of certain lexical units, their collocability, use in a figurative context, sociocultural coloring, etc. The results of the project allow us to expand our understanding of the multifaceted personality of Lomonosov and at the same time place his German texts in the context of the German language of the 18th century. Refs 16.