The Changes in the Lexicographic Principles of Representation of Phraseological Units and Stable Word Combinations in the <i>Dictionary of the Modern Russian Literary Language</i> and in the <i>Large Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language</i>
In the article, the author tries to trace and describe some changes in the dictionary authors' approach to the inclusion and figuration of various types of stable word combinations and idioms in the dictionaries. Phraseology is traditionally included in the dictionaries of the Russian language. However, it was the period of the compilation of the Dictionary of the Modern Russian Literary Language that coincided with the beginning of the active development of the theory of phraseology, and the authors of the first volumes of the dictionary gradually introduced its achievements into their lexicographic practice. In the first four volumes of the first edition of the dictionary, one can see a rather undifferentiated approach to the formulation of phraseology, while the subsequent volumes show much clearer principles for the separation and figuration of idioms and other stable word combinations. In the latest edition of the dictionary, these principles have been largely improved and simplified, brought into line with modern lexicographic practice and modern phraseological theory. The difference in the authors' concept is especially obvious when comparing the same stable word combinations in these two dictionaries. In the final part of the article, the author proposes to consider phraseology in the dictionary more formally, given the urgent task of our time of translating dictionaries from text format to the format of electronic databases. Due to this, it seems necessary to try to present the phraseological material in the modern dictionary in a format that can be processed in an automatic mode. In particular, the author of the article suggests one of the possible variants of solving the problem of assigning an idiom with one of the words in it, using the principle of alphabetical ordering "by the first significant word, commonly a noun". If there is no noun in the idiom, one should refer the idiom to the first adjective (if there is none, to the first adverb and so on). A possible solution for an automated work with various kinds of stable word combinations is to label each of these combinations and each idiom (not only the first in line). In the conclusion of the article, the author notes that it seems that there is a need to revise the role of the lexicographer working on a modern dictionary. A contemporary lexicographer should act as an analyst of the database in relation to the already existing text dictionary in order to solve the problem of adapting this material to a new format -the electronic database format.