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Sergey Andreev

Some properties of a metalinguistic verbal system (in the metalanguage of the Macmillan English Dictionary's defining vocabulary)

The study of metalanguage in linguistics has shifted from largely theoretical to more pract­­ical questions. In trying to achieve a more precise, universal and objective way of defining the mean­ings of lexical units, compilers of many dictionaries have started to work out ‘defining voc­abularies'. These are characterized by such features as a relatively short and closed list of elements, and the capability of expressing the various shades of meanings of all the lexical units in a language. Systems of ‘defining vocabulary' actually represent empirically devised metalanguages which possess certain features of the natural languages from which they have been created, but at the same time differ from those natural languages, because they describe an already existing linguistic system. The paper deals with (1) the predictive relevance of formal characteristics, singled out at dif­ferent linguistic levels, for choosing words for the metalanguage and (2) a comparison of the rel­ation­ship between the charateristics in a metalanguage and in the natural language from which that meta­language was derived. The study is based on the verbal systems of the English language and the defining vocabulary in the Macmillan English Dictionary (2002). Correlation analysis (the coefficients of ?ole for alternative characteristics and Jaccard) is used in the study.

Glottometrics, RAM-Verlag

Volume: 14, 03/2007
Pages: 21-31

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