Scientific text

Specialized Dictionaries

England and America have accumulated vast collections of idiomatic or colloquial phrases, pro­verbs and other, usually image-bearing word-groups with profuse il­lustrations. But the compilers' approach is in most cases purely empiric. By phraseology many of them mean all forms of linguistic anomalies which transgress the laws of grammar or logic and which are approved by usage. Therefore alongside set-phrases they enter free phrases and even separate words. The choice of items is arbitrary, based on intuition and not on any objective criteria. Different meanings of polysemantic units are not singled out, homonyms are not discriminated, no variant phrases are listed.

An Anglo-Russian Phraseological Dictionary by A. V. Koonin pub­lished in our country has many advantages over the reference books published abroad-and can be considered the first dictionary of English phraseology proper. To ensure the highest possible cognitive value and quick finding of necessary phrases the dictionary enters phrase variants and structural, synonyms, distinguishes between polysemantic and homonymic phrases, shows word- and form-building abilities of phra­seological units and illustrates their use by quotations.

New Words dictionaries have it as their aim adequate reflection of the continuous growth of the English language.

There are three dictionaries of neologisms for Modern English. Two of these (Berg P. A Dictionary of New Words in English, 1953; Reifer, M. Dictionary of New Words, N. Y., 1955) came out in the middle of the 50s and are somewhat out-of-date. The third (A Dictionary of New Eng­lish. A Barnhart Dictionary, L., 1973) is more up-to-date.

The Barnhart Dictionary of New English covers words, phrases, mean­ings and abbreviations which came into the vocabulary of the English language during the period 1963—1972. The new items were collected from the reading of over half a million running words from US, British and Canadian sources—newspapers, magazines and books.

Dictionaries of slang contain elements from areas of substandard speech such as vulgarisms, jargonisms, taboo words, curse-words, colloquialisms, etc.

The most well-known dictionaries of the type are Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English by E. Partridge, Dictionary of the Underworld:

British and American, The American Thesaurus of Slang by L. V. Berry & M. Den Bork, The Dictionary of American Slang by H. Wentworth and S. B. Flexner.

Usage dictionaries make it their business to pass jud­gement on usage problems of all kinds, on what is right or wrong. De­signed for native speakers they supply much various information on such usage problems as, e.g., the difference in meaning between words like comedy, farce and burlesque, illusion and delusion, formality and formalism, the proper pronunciation of words like foyer, yolk, noncha­lant, the plural forms of the nouns flamingo, radix, commander-in-chief, the meaning of such foreign words as quorum, quadroon, quatrocento, and of such archaic words as yon, yclept, and so forth. E. g. A Desk-Book of Idioms and Idiomatic Phrases by F. N. Vizetelly and L. G. De Bekker includes such words as cinematograph, dear, (to) fly, halfbaked, etc. They also explain what is meant by neologisms, archaisms, colloquial and slang words and how one is to handle them, etc.

J Offer your variant of translating one of the examples.