Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Edit Gaál: Dictionaries and methaphors: a consideration of the presentation of methaphoric usages in a selection of dictonaries

language (Lipka, 1992). As the editorial director claims in the General introduction "The Longman Citation Corpus ... has been expanded and updated by adding a further two million words of randomly gathered computerized text from current British and American newspapers, and another half a million words of citations covering 15,000 neologisms, gathered by human editors, and then computerized.". It is an undeniable fact that besides its other numerous specific features, the LDCE demonstrates the use and meaning of words in extensive contexts. The Cambridge International Dictionary of English (CIDE) is built around the enormous software resource of the Cambridge Language Survey of 100 million words, both written and spoken. In the Foreword it is clearly stated that their "first concern in writing CIDE has been clarity and simplicity" and that "a specific innovation of CIDE is that each entry is for one core meaning" and "within each entry is a rich range of information...". It is basically aimed at learners and users of English as a Foreign Language using the results of language research and analysis. The American Heritage Dictionary (AHD), is "an original venture with etymological information and usage notes, based on the deliberations of a panel" (Lipka, 1992.). Having used the software version of this dictionary for a while I have chosen it as a resource in this article because besides its useful features, such as showing syllable structure, listing synonyms and antonyms, and presenting words in context etc., it serves as an interesting diverse resource with its preference for American English. There are two relevant issues we need to look into prior to the analysis of the metaphorical meanings of the words selected. The first one is what linguists assume to be the main requirements of dictionaries and the second is what is meant by metaphor in the linguistic sense of the word. 3 The main requirements of dictionaries Linguists generally agree that dictionaries store valuable lexical, semantic, phonetic and syntactic information about the wordstock of a language (Leech 1981, Lyons 1977). But they also emphasize their limits. Dictionaries record a language, especially its vocabulary, in the state of a given time that will neccessarily be out-of-date by the time of the publication. Another restriction is the size that will define the principles of selection and the lexicographic conventions the team follows and the corpus they use. Some linguists (Aitchison 1994, Lyons 1977, Campbell 1975) conclude that it would be impossible to expect more from dictionaries than they can actually provide. However, there have been attempts to develop new concepts for dictionaries. I wish to mention one of them, which Katz 103