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No One is the Loser Here or Usage Notes in Selected Dictionaries

Summary/Abstract: In this article we comment on the design of usage notes in both monolingual and translation dictionaries from the perspective of the pedagogical lexicography. The main focus here is on language production and information data of which the purpose is to warn dictionary users of errors at various levels of the language system (lexical, morphological, syntactic etc.). Against the background of an analysis of present practice in selected dictionaries, the article attempts a concrete design proposal of the usage notes in the Large Academic Dictionary German-Czech. Specifically, it concerns questions such as: “Which concrete phenomena should be addressed in the usage notes?”, “Which requirements has the metalanguage used in the usage notes to meet?” etc. It is posited that a large corpus of texts produced by Czech learners of German and German speaking learners of Czech is a prerequisite for improvement of the usage notes in German-Czech dictionaries as such corpus would facilitate a more objective (because statistically more relevant) analyses of learners’ language. Regretfully, this still remains a desideratum.

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