"Ausgerechnet mir muss das passieren!" Though deal for lexicography in treatment of focus particles in German-Czech dictionaries
Abstract
This study analyses and presents the lexicographical treatment of focus particles (auch, nur, sogar, ...) in German-Czech dictionaries. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the current state of the lexicographical treatment of this group of particles and highlight specific issues.
The focus is on both the macrostructure and microstructure of the respective dictionary and the analysed entries. Problems include, for instance, word type specifications, unclear definition of the term particle, lack of examples or insufficient metalanguage comments.
Subsequently, it will be illustrated how the lexicographic editing of these focus particles in an academic dictionary should be expanded and how the stated problems can be solved by using knowledge of modern linguistics and methods of corpus linguistics. The suggested solutions, such as the specification of the specific particle subclass, the exact classification of the respective meanings, exemplification which exceeds the length of a sentence, syntactic properties or the specification of accent, are then generalized for the entire group of focus particles and set in relation to a possible lexicographical treatment of the entire word class of particles.