Words in Dictionaries and History

Download or read book Words in Dictionaries and History written by Olga Timofeeva and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together fifteen articles by scholars in Europe and North America, this collection aims to represent and advance studies in historical lexis. It highlights the significance of the understanding of dictionary-making and language-making as important socio-cultural phenomena. With its general focus on England and English, the book investigates the reception and development of historical and modern English vocabulary and culture in different periods, social and professional strata, geographical varieties of English, and other national cultures. The volume is based on individual (meta)lexicographical, etymological, lexicosemantic and corpus studies, representing two large areas of research: the first part focuses on the history of dictionaries, analysing them in diachrony from the first professional dictionaries of the Baroque period via Enlightenment and Romanticism to exploring the possibilities of the new online lexicographical publications; and the second part looks at the interfaces between etymology, semantic development and word-formation on the one hand, and changes in society and culture on the other.