Comparative dictionary of Slavic languages: Conception and implementation

The paper presents a new project in Slavic lexicography, the ideographic ?Comparative Dictionary of Slavic Languages?. The project is being implemented at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Academician S. M. Tolstoy. The idea of creating a dictionary has appeared in the Moscow Ethnolinguistic School, namely in its part that is primarily related to the study of language and is traditionally called ?narrow? ethnolinguistics. The dictionary is intended as a supplement to the well-known ideographic dictionary of selected Indo-European synonyms by C. D. Buck, which contains material from only five Slavic languages, with significant errors. The comparative dictionary will include all the meanings presented in Buck?s dictionary (belonging to 22 thematic groups of the basic lexicon), with some additions. The structure of each entry will follow Buck?s pattern with some changes. It will contain a list of lexemes expressing a meaning in 16 Slavic and 5 non-Slavic languages (Romanian, Albanian, Greek, Hungarian and Lithuanian), as well as a detailed explication of the meaning. Unlike Buck?s dictionary, in addition to a description of the motivation and etymology of the word, the dictionary will contain a description of other semantic features of the word: secondary meanings, semantics of derivatives, connotations, lexical-typological features. When Slavic languages differ in the way of conceptualizing meaning, the dictionary describes the motivational features of each of the Slavic synonyms, differences in the lexical view of the world in different Slavic languages, areal oppositions. In the future, the dictionary should become the basis for various studies of the Slavic lexicalsemantic system as a whole.