Resumen de Then and now: competence and performance in 35 years of Lexicography
This paper describes the process of writing a bilingual English-French dictionary in the late 1960s, and contrasts it with a similar task in the early 21st century, with all the benefits of a large text corpus and sophisticated query tools. The lexicography focuses on the entries for cook and cooking, designed for use both by an encoding English speaker and a decoding French speaker. Lexicographic evidence for the new entries comes from a lOO-million-word corpus of British English, a small corpus of French for the words cuire, cuisine, cuisiner, cuisinier, and cuisson, and their inflected forms, and a small parallel corpus of English and French texts. The use of KWIC concordancing, the Word Sketch program and the FrameNet database is described in detail, together with the problems of equivalence encountered. An account is given of the way in which these problems are tackled and the dictionary entry is drafted.
