Insights into English and Germanic lexicology and lexicography: Past and present perspectives

This volume examines the two related disciplines of lexicology and lexicography. Lexicology—where the focus is on the nature of words— forms the first part of the volume, while lexicography, and its consequent attention to the analysis of words in dictionaries, informs the essays in the second part of the work. The lexicological studies begin with an examination of vocabulary changes in the evolution of the English language. These analyses are then followed by a group of interrelated essays which take as their object the concept of vision and how it is lexicalized. The essays are based on the theory of lexical complexity and are complemented by the final two essays in the lexicological group that are instead corpus-driven linguistic analyses designed to tease out hidden meanings in words and their collocations. A similar attention to detail, methodological awareness, and the most recent literature in the field is reflected in the essays on lexicography. The essays include a researcher’s guide to the 453 early English dictionaries in the Cordell Collection (Indiana State University in Terre Haute); a study of Matthias Moth’s project to compile a dictionary of the Danish language in the early eighteenth century; the concept and realization of etymological accuracy in Blount’s, Johnson’s and Webster’s dictionaries as well as other similarly insightful studies of both historical and modern- day issues in the field of lexicography.