DICTIONARY OF MYTHOLOGY AND FOLKLORE AS A SOURCE OF ‘PRECEDENT’ KNOWLEDGE (WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO ENGLISH LANGUAGE DICTIONARIES AND ENCYCLOPAEDIAS)

Abstract

Тhis article addresses the problem of lexicographic description of mytholexemes and folkloronyms as accumulators of reference cultural or “precedent” knowledge. The author proceeds from the idea that mythologemes play an essential and sometimes determining role in various kinds of discourses – religious and literary, media, scientifi c, etc. Accordingly, mytholexemes as linguistic representatives of mythologemes form the precedent (intertextual) thesaurus of language speakers, building an extensive corpus of universal-, national- and group-tier precedent phenomena, possessing such properties as recognisability, emotional and cognitive value, pragmatic signifi cance, and the ability to be reinterpreted. To ensure eff ective communication, which presupposes a relative balance of intertextual thesauri of its participants, information resources describing mytholexemes and folkloronyms as culturally specifi c precedent units are indispensable. The aim of the study is to analyze the existing practices of lexicographic description of mytholexemes and folkloronyms in English dictionaries and to work out a model of a dictionary entry optimal for full-fl edged characterization of mytholexemes with explicit precedent content. In this respect, it seems reasonable to describe this category of units by adopting the ideographic (thesaurus) approach, which makes it possible to locate the unit in the system of the myth as well as show the links with other mytholexemes (often culturally specifi c precedent units too), lined up on the intra-linguistic and extra-linguistic plane both vertically (hierarchically) and horizontally. The thesaurus approach can be implemen ted at the level of dictionary macro-composition – that is, it can be embodied in an ideographic or thematic dictionary, and/or at the level of its micro-composition – in this case the dictionary can have an alphabetical organization, while the entry will contain references to hyperonyms, hyponyms, synonyms, antonyms (if any), associations to a given unit etc. The obligatory parts of the dictionary entry should include the defi nition of the mytholexeme, its alternative variants (if any), idioms and/or collocations containing this language unit, intercultural and intertextual references emphasizing the precedent status of the unit, the word family, reference labels and example sentences.