Title: Main principles of material selection and presentation in the Explanatory Dictionary of Compound Words of the Russian Language
Abstract: This paper describes the principles of material selection and presentation in the Explanatory Dictionary of Compound Words of the Russian Language (hereinafter the Dictionary). Only compound appellatives — i. e. abbreviations created with the help of non-initial abbreviate constructions — are included into the Dictionary. Their formal onomasiological status is essentially different from the formal onomasiological status of truncations and initial abbreviations. The former are identified as phonetic variants of their generating units rather than independent words. The latter appear to be based on artificial reduction of phrase components to their first sounds or letters and become units that are not isomorphic to their equivalent word combinations. A synchronic approach was used to describe compound appellatives. Firstly, according to this approach, only words that possess text equivalents in a language at a particular moment in time are seen as abbreviations. Secondly, there exist multiple motivations (decryptions) for most units presented in the Dictionary. Compound appellatives have never been an object of a separate lexicographic description; they are rarely considered in either explanatory or abbreviation dictionaries. This Dictionary is necessary due to the idiomatisation of compound words’ semantics which requires full interpretation in addition to the interpretation through equivalents traditional for abbreviation dictionaries. Moreover, multiple text equivalence that forms the polysemy of abbreviations has never been considered and, therefore, described before. The formation of compound abbreviated appellatives has now become, perhaps, the most productive way of word formation, and the Dictionary will reflect the most current trends in Russian. The article also describes the following principles of material presentation in the Dictionary: dictionary entries are organised based on abbreviation groups; decryption stimuli (stereotypical decoding) of an abbreviate construction are presented in the block of an abbreviation group; dictionary entries describe equivalence nests of abbreviations that include an interpretation block, a block of textual equivalents, a block of lexical equivalents and a block of abbreviated derivatives.