Modern trends in English Lexicography are connected with the appearance and rapid development of such branches of linguistics as Corpus Linguistics and Computational Linguistics.
Corpus-based Linguistics deals mainly with compiling various electronic corpora for conducting investigations in linguistic fields such as phonetics, phonology, grammar, stylistic, discourse, lexicon and many others. Corpora are large and systematic enterprises: they contain conversations, magazine articles, newspapers, lectures, chapters of novels, brochures, etc
A large and well-constructed corpus gives excellent information about frequency, distribution, and typicality of linguistic features – such as words, collocations, spellings, pronunciations, and grammatical constructions. The development of Corpus Linguistics has given birth to Corpus-based Lexicography and a new corpus-based generation of dictionaries.
The British National Corpus (both written and spoken) has over 100 million words. The written part (90%) includes extracts from newspapers, academic books, school and university essays, etc. The spoken part (10%) includes a large amount of unscripted informal conversation, recorded by volunteer selected from different age, region and social classes in a demographically balanced way.
Computational Linguistics is the branch of linguistics in which the techniques of computer science are applied to the analysis and synthesis of language and speech.
Computational Lexicography deals with the design, compilation, use and evaluation of electronic dictionaries, which differ in form, content, and function from conventional word-books. Among the most significant differences are:
1) the use of multimedia means: sound, animation, audio, and visual elements as well as interactive exercises and games;
2) the navigable help indices in windows oriented software;
3) the varied possibilities of search and access methods that allow the user to specify the output in a number of ways;
According to present-day view, the learner’s dictionary is a general synchronic dictionary in their coverage of phraseological units and expressions. They differ from native speaker’s reference books only in amount of information about singular and relatively uncommon items which exist in ‘the vocabulary at large’ but do not represent the typical features of the lexicon. Learner’s dictionaries develop new ways of defining words and provide information necessary for encoding.
