The active dictionary of lexical combinatorics as a means of optimizing language learning

Abstract

An important element of language competence is the knowledge of different features of lexical combinatorics. This article describes the structure of an Active Russian-Ukrainian Combinatory Dictionary of Nouns. The main goal of the Dictionary lies within the systematic representation of lexical combinatorics of a particular entry keyword along with its translation equivalent. A keyword is a Russian noun which designates such situations as an action, activity, process, pro-perty, state, or an event. Each lexeme which denotes a situation usually relates to a number of other lexemes that denote correlation between the participants of a situation, its variable signs, typical impacts, e.g., beginning or terminating a particular situation, its creation or ending, and other impacts constrained by its specifics. It is essential that different names of situations relate to different sets of lexemes attached to them. A combination of words with the name of a situa-tion and a lexeme that this name relates to is called collocation. In corpus linguistics, colloca-tions are described by means of apparatus of lexical functions (LF). Thus, the accompanying lexeme of the word combination conveys the meaning of LF for which the name of situation serves as an argument. In the Dictionary, eасh entry involves not only a Russian noun naming situation and its Ukrainian translation but also a set of collocations that correlate with the noun. Each Russian collocation is accompanied by its Ukrainian equivalent. The use of such a dic-tionary furthers the knowledge of the user’s native (first) language (Russian or Ukrainian). The Dictionary is especially important for learners of Ukrainian as a second language. It contains information about “paradigmatic syntagmatics” in Ukrainian yet not fully represented in bilin-gual dictionaries. Keywords: dictionary, noun, combinatorics, collocation, lexical function, predicate, actant.