User’s Guides in General English-Latvian Dictionaries

Abstract

The purpose of the user’s guide is to introduce the user to the dictionary layout and provide information on its use. Its location can vary from dictionary to dictionary, but in most cases it is placed in the front matter. Since the user’s guide can be viewed as an umbrella term for a cluster of several metafunctional outside matter components (e.g. the list of abbreviations, pronunciation key, etc.), special attention is paid to the overall contents of these components rather than to their titles which might not be sufficiently revealing. The study focuses on the analysis of the user’s guides in the general English-Latvian dictionaries (ELDs) compiled from 1924 to 2007, forming the English-Latvian lexicographic tradition. The aim of the study is to describe the typical contents and elements of the user’s guides in ELDs, as well as to trace the development of this metafunctional outside matter component throughout the lexicographic tradition. The analysis revealed that at the beginning of the tradition there was no clear distinction between the preface and the user’s guide, the latter as a distinct outside matter component was established and developed in the Soviet period, but the dictionaries published by ‘Avots’ reveal a tendency towards unification of the user’s guides both structure and content-wise.