Lexicographica. Series Maior features monographs and edited volumes on the topics of lexicography and meta-lexicography. Works from the broader domain of lexicology are also included, provided they strengthen the theoretical, methodological and empirical basis of lexicography and meta-lexicography. The almost 150 books published in the series since its founding in 1984 clearly reflect the main themes and developments of the field. The publications focus on aspects of lexicography such as micro- and macrostructure, typology, history of the discipline, and application-oriented lexicographical documentation.

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Sir Thomas Elyot's Latin-English dictionary, published in 1538, became the leading work of its kind in England. Gabriele Stein describes this pioneering work, exploring its inner structure and workings, its impact on contemporary scholarship, and its later influence. The author opens with an account of Elyots life and publications. Sir Thomas Elyot (c. 1490-1546) was a humanist scholar and intellectual friend of Sir Thomas More. He was employed by Thomas Cromwell in diplomatic and official capacities that did more to impoverish than enrich him, and he sought to increase his income with writing. His treatise on moral philosophy, The Boke named the Governour, was published in 1531, and dedicated to Henry VIII. His popular treatise on medicine, The Castell of Helth, published some years later, went through seventeen editions. Professor Stein then considers how and why Elyot decided to compile a Latin-English dictionary. She looks at the guiding principles, the organization he devised, and the authors and texts he used as sources. She examines the books importance for the historical study of English, noting the lexical regionalisms and items of vulgar usage in the Promptuorum parvulorum and the dictionaries of Palsgrave and Elyot before discussing Elyots linking of lemma and gloss, and use of generic reference points. She explains how Elyot translated and defined the Latin headwords and compares his practice with his predecessors. The author ends with a detailed assessment of Elyots impact on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dictionaries and his place in Renaissance lexicography. Her exploration of the work of an outstanding sixteenth-century scholar will interest historians of the English language, lexicography, and the intellectual climate of Tudor England.

Better Words provides an introduction to EFL lexicography and an insight into its fundamental issues and problems. It describes in detail the major changes that have occurred in the production of EFL dictionaries over recent decades and will help teachers and their students to assess the description of the word stock on offer and to decide which EFL dictionary is the most adequate for their specific purposes. During the last twenty-five years lexicographers and their publishers have experimented with new ways of describing and presenting the words included in their EFL dictionaries to make them more accessible to users. This book compares these dictionaries and critically reviews the lexicographal achievements in the description and presentation of word meanings, registers, exemplification, cultural contexts and pictorial illustrations. It also examines the advantages and disadvantages of using a bilingual and a monolingual EFL dictionary. Better Words is a companion volume to Chosen Words: Past and Present Problems for Dictionary Makers by Noel Osselton (1995) and Living Words: Language, Lexicography and the Knowledge Revolution by Tom McArthur (1998). Both are published by University of Exeter Press in the series Exeter Language and Lexicography. The general editors of this series are Reinhard Hartmann and Tom McArthur.

The year 1530 saw the publication in London of one of the most remarkable books of the Renaissance: Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse. The author of this vast work of over 1,000 pages was John Palsgrave, graduate of Cambridge, Paris, and Oxford, priest and chaplain to Henry VIII, and tutor to the King's sister. His book is the first dictionary of two neighbouring vernaculars, English and French, and simultaneously the first contrastive grammar of the two languages. It reveals him as a pioneering and exceptional linguist with a sharply observant and analytical mind, who goes far beyond the traditional application of Latin grammar-writing to two living languages. The book is also remarkable for the liveliness with which Palsgrave discusses and illustrates the social aspects of language use, dialectal variation, and the vigour of colloquial idiom. In this uniquely detailed study Stein sets the author and his book in their wider sociohistorical context and discusses Palsgrave's syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analyses, some of which anticipate the findings of modern linguistics by over 400 years.

The book examines the work of Renaissance lexicographers such as John Palsgrave, Claudius Hollyband, Richard Huloet, and Peter Levins, with particular focus on the author at work: the struggles of these lexicographers to understand the semantic range of a word and to explain and transpose it into another language; their assessment of different linguistic and cultural expressions, and their morphological analyses; and their efforts to find ways of structuring and presenting lexical information. Gabriele Stein explores the influence of the works by Ambrogio Calepino, Robert Estienne, Hadrianus Junius, and Conrad Gesner, and the extent to which bi- and multilingual dictionaries in the 16th century are often pan-European in character; she also provides the first in-depth and richly-illustrated discussion of the use of typographical resources to present the structure of lexical information.