Eponyms as cultural key words and their lexicographic description in English and Russian

• Autores: Natalia Bragina, Sophia Lubensky
• Localización: Proceedings of the Tenth EURALEX International Congress, EURALEX 2002: Copenhagen, Denmark, August 13-17, 2002 / Anna Braasch (ed. lit.), Claus Povlsen (ed. lit.), Vol. 1, 2003, ISBN 87-90708-09-1, págs. 419-427
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper focuses on some aspects of the cultural and lexicographic description of eponyms in Russian and English (predominantly American English). The discussion ofthese aspects is viewed as a step toward creating a bilingual cross-cultural dictionary ofeponyms. The dictionary should familiarize users with overlapping and distinct aspects of the cultures' collective memory, thus assisting speakers of different languages to better understand each other and each other's cultures. The term eponym is used here in reference to people (real people, Biblical and literary characters, gods and heroes in Greek and Roman mythology, etc.) whose names or derivatives thereofhave distinct cultural associations and have become an inalienable part of cultural discourse. The eponyms are regarded as cultural key words, in as much as they represent a common heritage for different¿ in our case Russian- and English-speaking¿cultures. The paper discusses the following lexicographic aspects of a dictionary of eponyms: the word list; linguistic factors characterizing an eponym's stability in the lexicon; methods ofdescribing eponyms from grammatical, encyclopedic, and socio-cultural standpoints; and the crosscultural correlation between eponyms. A dictionary of eponyms would fill an important but underappreciated gap in the available inventory of lexical and cross-cultural resources.