ON THE LEXICOGRAPHIC TREATMENT OF VERBS IN ENGLISHSERBIAN TERMINOLOGICAL DICTIONARIES

Abstract

The paper investigates the place of verbs within the terminological system of bilingual English-Serbian dictionaries, focusing on those authored by field specialists. The method is a corpus-based contrastive analysis of an English-Serbian waste management dictionary with about 1900 terms, which builds on the research results so far, as well as the preliminary quantitative analysis of three English-Serbian dictionaries, all authored by field professionals, according to which nouns dominate, while those for verbs make a much smaller count. Since the corpus findings in this research also indicate an uneven coverage of word classes in favor of nouns, the paper discusses the need to provide more room for verbs in bilingual English-Serbian dictionaries. In that respect, the paper discusses entries labelled as nouns and adjectives in the corpus, but derived from verbs and argues that specialized dictionaries should be organized in such a way to include entries for the verbs from which these nouns and adjectives were derived.