Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Ramesh Krishnamurthy: Change and continuity at COBUILD (1986-1996)

5 A Brief Comparison Of The Original Cobuild Dictionary (1987) And The New Edition (1995) 5.1 Features Most of the important surface features of the original dictionary have been retained: selection of headwords based on corpus frequencies, full-sentence definitions explaining usages in terms of linguistic context (collocations, structural patterns) and social context (style, register, pragmatics), use of real examples from the corpus, and so on. However, in response to our continuing research and users' comments, some changes have been made: 5.1.1 Superheadwords Long entries ('superheadwords') have been subdivided for easier reference either by semantic or syntactic grouping. 5.1.2 Grammar Codes The grammar codes have changed from a mixture of formal and functional labels (e.g. V+O; V = verb = formal label; O = object = functional label) into a simple surface description consisting of only formal labels (e.g. V n; V = verb = formal label; n = noun or noun group = formal label). Also, the examples have been ordered so that they match the sequence of grammar codes. 5.1.3 Superordinates Superordinates were provided in the 1987 Dictionary, but were not easily understood, and were usually already contained in the explanations, so they have been omitted from the 1995 edition. 5.1.4 Frequency Bands Frequency information has been added for every headword: five black diamonds means that the headword is in the 'most frequent' band, no diamonds means that the word is in the 'least frequent' band. About 15,000 headwords have one or more diamonds. 5.1.5 Pragmatics Although pragmatic information was an important feature of the 1987 Dictionary, many users commented that it was not clearly signalled, and was therefore easily overlooked. Therefore, in the 1995 edition, a box labelled PRAGMATICS has been introduced into the Extra Column. 75