Lexicography

expression of ideas”. His work tended to inhibit fresh thinking on the whole
subject of synonymy.
Thus, the aims of thesaurus are: 1) to enrich individual lexicon of a user; 2) in
information system and work – to unify and replace lexical units in a text by
standard words and expressions [so called descriptors] in the process of
codifying and indexing of documents.
It has 2 meanings: 1) a dictionary with maximum fully represented words of a
given language with complete enumeration of examples, having been used in
texts; 2) an ideographic dictionary in which semantic relations are shown
between lexical units (synonymous, antonymous, gender relations, etc.).
In the first meaning Thesaurus is possible only for dead languages, e.g.
Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, 1900 or Dictionary of the Polish Language [16 th
century] was published in 1966. It is impossible to cite all examples for the
existing languages.
Nevertheless some attempts were made by Russian lexicographers: J.K. Grott,
A.A. Shachmatov, L.V. Schterba.
The structural basis of thesaurus in the second meaning – hierarchic system of
notions which allows to look for a lexical unit from notion (meaning). To look
for a notion from the word they use alphabetic order (alphabetical index).
Alphabetic index is used in Roget’s thesaurus of English words and Phrases
(1652). The name of a dictionary gave the second usage of the notion
“thesaurus”. In theoretical aspect Thesaurus is one of the possible lexis patterns
of semantic system: here lexis corresponds to all the words in a language.
To sum it up, thesaurus consists of words grouped according to their meaning.
The aim is to provide a source of words that express the same idea or closely
related ideas. Thus each thesaurus paragraph on a particular topic contains a
range of words covering different parts of speech and different levels of
formality or informality. Vulgar and colloquial terms have all been appropriately
labeled in the thesaurus.
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