AR IŠTIKTUKAI REIKALINGI DVIKALBIAME ŽODYNE?
ARE ONOMATOPOEIC INTERJECTIONS NECESSARY IN A BILINGUAL DICTIONARY?

Summary/Abstract: One of the major and complex problems that lexicographers face is how to balance lexis in a large monolingual or bilingual dictionary. The issue has been addressed from different angles by different scholars in Lithuania and other countries. However, the question whether the chosen wide scope of lexical register in entries represent all word classes with their meanings, forms and function peculiarities has been understudied so far. Although nominative and directive parts of speech prevail in any language and thus they naturally play the most significant role in choosing entries, such expressive parts of speech as interjection and onomatopoeic interjection perform a specific and unique function of filling the language with different sounds of the world. While employing analytical and descriptive methods, the paper studies how often onomatopoeic interjections are presented in entries of large dictionaries; also peculiarities of definitions are analysed and their importance in the dictionary macrostructure is discussed. Five bilingual dictionaries of large volume are analysed (Lithuanian-Norwegian Dictionary (2001), Lithuanian-Italian Dictionary (2003), two volumes of Lithuanian-German Dictionary (2004), New Lithuanian-English Dictionary (2002) and Lithuanian-French Dictionary (2006)). Having analysed the entries of the dictionaries, it was found that only three of them contain a larger or smaller amount of onomatopoeic interjections. However, in cases when onomatopoeic interjections were included into entries of the dictionaries, their lexicographical description was not accurate and exhaustive enough. The compilers of the bilingual dictionaries did not define the meanings of the onomatopoeic interjection properly; therefore, users of the dictionaries may encounter difficulties while trying to code (native speaker) and decode (non-native speaker) linguistic information. It is argued that in future new and revised bilingual dictionaries should contain onomatopoeic interjections of all semantic groups and their definitions should conform to modern lexicographical principles.

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