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

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (COD) and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDCE) treat the metaphorical usages of the examined words in a similar way to each other concerning the number and content of meanings. Taking one example, the word 'duck', the meanings in COD: '3. ducks (colloq

.) darling, attractive thing, 4. duck's egg (cricket) - batsman's score of 0 'and in LDCE: '3. (infml) a person one likes, 4. (cricket

) the failure of a batsman to make any runs at all are practically the same. The other difference in the treatment of metaphorical usages by the dictionaries is if they label them or not, and if so, what labels are used. In many cases COD, LDCE, AHD and CIDE do not use any labels for metaphorical usages, they seem to consider them to belong to the common core of words that Randolph Quirk (1973) defines as the "neutral or unmarked variety of English, bearing no obvious colouring that has been induced by attitude". Such examples are 'lily' in COD: '2. person or thing of special whiteness or purity', or 'chest' in LDCE: '(the amount contained in) a large strong box in which valuable objects are kept, goods packed, etc.: a chest of tea', or 'shoulder' in AHD: '6. a The angle between the face and flank of a bastion in a fortification'

, or 'lion' in CIDE: 'A lion is someone who is important or successful and is very enthusiastic and energetic about what they are doing: He is one of the young jazz lions (=people who are starting to become important and successful) on the New York music scene'. The labels commonly used in all four dictionaries are 'slang', 'colloquial', 'ironical', 'literary', 'humorous', 'informal', 'figurative' or the name of a register, e.g.: in COD 'cricket' in 'duck's egg (cricket) - batsman's score of 0'. Some labels overlap each other in meaning, like colloquial and informal, or are very close, like ironical and humorous. Obviously the use of terms is arbitrary in the sense that it reflects the preferences of different teams of lexicographers but does not reveal basic theoretical distinctions. It is also a natural consequence of the fact that English vocabulary is extremely rich in synomyms. But all the labels have one common feature: they refer to the different varieties of the language providing guidance on the pragmatic aspects of language use, i.e., the situations in which the given usages are appropriate, or are likely to be found and the kind of stylistic colouring they will add to the speaker's message. The approach is linguistic, though pragmatic rather than semantic, and that is why no labelling as metaphor can be found, but actually a lot of metaphorical usages are recorded in the dictionaries examined. The other line of thought for analysis is the question as to whether there is a connection between the number of metaphorical meanings enlisted in the given resources and the meanings of the words. What follows here is my 108