Žodyno vaizdinys Lietuvių kalbos žodyne
The mental image of the dictionary in the dictionary of the Lithuanian language (Lietuvių kalbos žodynas)

Summary/Abstract: The importance of the academic Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language (Lietuviųkalbos žodynas) for various interdisciplinary research has been written many times. Its motive is constantly appearing in non-academic texts also. So the concept of the dictionary for the semantic mental image’s analysis has been deliberately chosen. Looking at the lexicographic articles of the great dictionary as a specific discourse created in a certain way and reading them in different cuts, we can find various data about the features of Lithuanian worldview and world outlook. The goal of this article is to analyze the semantic mental image of the dictionary formed in the hypertext of the academic dictionary and to determine which mental image’s features are considered to be the most important, most relevant, using a wide and different discourse of the 20 volumes of the dictionary. In order to achieve this goal, several specific tasks were set out: in the way of researching the collected material by interpretative, analytical descriptive and semantic analysis methods to describe the structure, types, volume, authors, material of the dictionary, to represent the course of the lexicographical works and the difficulties which the dictionary makers faced during the preparation of dictionaries, to highlight the disadvantages which are noticeable in the dictionaries and show the value of dictionaries.The research material was collected by looking vertically to all 20 volumes of the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language and reading the hypertext of the dictionary horizontally. 211 head words were found reading the lexicographic articles in this way, the illustrations of them contain a lexeme dictionary. The vast majority (even 98 %) of the illustrations used with the lexeme dictionary were written out from the various authors’(mainly linguists, cultural and public figures) written sources. The dictionary is also mentioned in the various academic publications (in the journals, Grammar of the Lithuanian language, other dictionaries, etc.). Only 2 illustrations with a lexeme dictionary are written from the living language. So the data of the hypertext of the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language analyzed in this study shows the mental image of dictionary which was formed by the linguistic specialists – lexicographers, grammarians, dialectologists and the researchers of other language science fields, and also by the cultural activists and fiction writers.The material for the research was collected from all 20 volumes, only the data of Complement Card Index was eliminated, and this is why it is important to describe that the final results reflect the mental image of the dictionary formed in the Lithuanian world view till the 21st century.After the semantic analysis of the illustrative material of the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language, the following main features of the dictionary’s mental image are distinguished: the structure, type, author, volume, lexicographic material of the dictionary,course of lexicographic works, difficulties faced preparing the dictionaries, the disadvantages and value of the dictionaries.The analysis of all illustrative samples with the lexeme dictionary shows that it is completely enough to have the data accumulated in the academic dictionary in case to make the detailed mental image of the dictionary. Because the second meaning of the word dictionary is very concrete, practical, so the formed generalized mental image of it is objective and clearly defined.The investigated material allows to arrange such a generalized dictionary’s mental image formed in the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language: the dictionary is a printed ormanuscript book composed of one, several, dozen or few dozen volumes and written by a single author or a collective; it is written in accordance with a certain instruction, it has its macrostructure and microstructure; after collecting the material from one or various sources(most often making the card index) the words or word combinations are presented alphabetically, by themes or according other system in the dictionary, usually the meaning of the word is described, it is also possible to specify the origin, history, geography of the word, to submit grammatical, accentuate, stylistic and other information, the samples of use,translations to one or few languages; such a publication has a practical and academic value(it is useful for learning your or foreign language, it is needed as the source for the various research of the language and culture).Obviously, the mental image of the dictionary would be slightly different whenentering the 21st century, however the comparing of the dictionary’s mental image in nowadays and how it changed could be the research object of the other article.

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