Lexicographic Approaches to Sense Disambiguation in Monolingual Dictionaries and Equivalent Differentiation in Bilingual Dictionaries

Abstract

The article discusses methods of sense disambiguation in monolingual dictionaries and equivalent differentiation in bilingual dictionaries. In current dictionaries, sense disambiguation and equivalent differentiation is presented in the form of specifiers or glosses, collocators or indications of context, (domain) labels, metalinguistic and encyclopaedic information. Each method is presented and illustrated by actual samples of dictionary articles taken from mono and bilingual dictionaries. The last part of the article is devoted to equivalent differentiation in bilingual decoding dictionaries. In bilingual dictionaries, equivalent differentiation is often needed to describe the lack of agreement between the source language (SL) and target language (TL). The article concludes by stating that equivalent differentiation should be written in the native language of the target audience and sense indicators in a monolingual learner’s dictionary should be words that the users are most familiar with.