Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

‘machine x’
‘shore’
bank/'baŋk/ ‘financial institution’
‘deposit or keep
(money) in a money’
2 or 3 3
Many-one furze/ /
‘plant x’ 2 2
gorse/ /
Manymany
toilet/toilit/
loo/ /
lavatory/ /
A-Z 393
‘appliance x’
‘site of appliance x’
3 6
apiece despite the variability of their morphemic representations in writing or in speech.
In most dictionaries there would be a single entry for controversy, with two British
English pronunciations, and a single entry for encyclopaedia, encyclopedia, here with
two alphabetically adjacent spellings.
Since the macrostructure of dictionaries is based on the form of their lexically relevant
units, most dictionaries would have a single entry each for penicillin, with one ‘sense’,
and for the noun crane, with two ‘senses’. About bank, however, dictionaries differ.
Almost all would have separate entries for the homographs (see SEMANTICS) 1 bank
‘shore’ and 2 bank ‘financial institution’ because of their different origins or etymologies:
1 bank came into Middle English from Scandinavian, while 2 bank derives from French or
Italian. As for the verb bank, some dictionaries would make it part of the entry for 2 bank
on etymological grounds; other dictionaries would make it yet a third homograph: 3 bank.
Thus in most dictionaries today, the mapping of entries or articles onto lexically
relevant units is usually either one-one, i.e. one entry to one unit as in the case of
penicillin, encyclop(a)edia, controversy, furze, gorse, l bank, 2 bank, 3 bank, or one-many,
i.e. one entry to many units, as in the case of crane, lavatory, loo, toilet. A many-one
mapping would be exemplified by separate entries for encyclopaedia and encyclopedia.
So most dictionaries are willing to bring together in a single entry a set of lexical units
that differ in meaning but have a common etymology and at least one common
morphemic representation, especially when their syntactic use, shown by their part of
speech (see TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR), is the same.
However, certain modern French dictionaries, notably the Larousse Dictionnaire du
français contemporain (DFC) and Lexis, impose additional restrictions on their entries.
Each entry must have a single set of inflections and a single set of derivatives. A
dictionary that applied this principle to English would have to make two homographs of
the verb shine: 1 shine (shined) and 2 shine (shone), and two homographs of the adjective
lame, of which 1 lame ‘crippled’ would have the derivative lameness and 2 lame
‘inadequate’ would have the derivatives lameness and lamely.
The lexical units discussed so far have had the form of single words. However,
dictionaries usually enter other types of lexical unit as well. These include the following: