Lexicography Meets Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Eugene Rivelis's book ... ('How is the Bilingual Dictionary Possible?' - hereafter ...) is an ambitious work that is packed with detail. Its main objective is the application of cognitive linguistics to lexicography /lexicology in a bilingual dictionary. The book consists of a one-page abstract in English and another in Russian; an introduction; and four lengthy chapters: ... 35-76), ... (pp. 77-126), ... (pp. 127-274), and ... (pp. 275-355). Each of these chapters is divided into several subsections that often deal with single lexical items; they are followed by an extensive bibliography (pp. 375-388) and three indexes (of scholars cited, topics, and actual lexical items). As I argue below, the author has set himself an immense task in attempting to answer the question posed in the title, and this issue will be cross-referenced throughout my review of his work. Although ... is published in Sweden and the author himself is based in that country, the examples of translation involve mostly Russian and English. It should be recalled, however, that many Scandinavian scholars produce in English much of the written work that they intend for audiences outside Scandinavia. Moreover, they display a very detailed knowledge of English and might therefore be expected to follow details of cited English examples better than most non-native English-speaking scholars. Kedc also includes examples involving Russian- Swedish translations as well as SwedishRussian translations of whole passages (cf. pp. 55 and 74). The accompanying expositions are in Russian and are extraordinarily detailed.... contains much discussion of terminology as well as lists of both English and Russian terminological abbreviations (all expansions are in Russian) and a three-page list of the dictionaries used as resources for Kedc (pp. 386-388). These include defining dictionaries (...) of Russian, English, and Swedish (not to mention all possible two-language combinations of these) together with a selection of phraseological and etymological dictionaries, among others. For every Russian and Swedish language corpus and Web site mentioned, Rivelis cites at least one appropriate dictionary as a source. The author also notes a draft of a sort of ... that he is producing under the title Svenska or di sammenhang (p. 24, fn. 16).4In response to the question posed by the title, Rivelis appears to hint that in theory bilingual dictionaries (...) cannot exist, but that in reality they do (pp. 22-23 and 142-143). He refers all the way back to Humboldt's view of language as a dichotomy between ergon (...) and energeia5 (... p. 22), which can, of course, be related to other dichotomies such as langue /paro Ie, competence/performance, active /passive knowledge, etc. Elsewhere (pp. 164-167) the author makes a distinction between nonuManue ('passive') vs. nepeeod ('active'), citing Russian near-equivalents for Swedish kranka and derivatives as well as Czech near-equivalents for English slight; he also includes usynenue as part of the nonuManue/ nepeeod framework (pp. 193-194). The discussion is extended to ... ('active/passive vocabulary'), whereby ... ('passive knowledge') and ... ('active knowledge') are not properly handled. The author suggests that the study of language as a whole has made impressive strides in distinguishing passive and active knowledge, but that lexicography is still at the stage of studying oannocmb. Interested in treating concepts rather than lexemes, Rivelis introduces early on the concepts ... and ... (p. 20 and passim) and utilises them throughout the book. In this context, however, one major omission in ... is the absence of any citation of Katzner 1994, which is possibly the best available bilingual dictionary and one of the most widely used in North America today. Hofstadter, in a discussion of Katzner' s work, cites the example of point as a difficult word to handle in a bilingual dictionary in contrast to relatively unchallenging forms like giraffe or geranium. …