Approaches to the Composition of Lexical Minima in Russia and Abroad: Problems and Prospects

Abstract
This paper presents an overview of the existing approaches in Russia and abroad to the compilation of minimal vocabulary lists. Special attention is paid to the English, as well as to the German scientific tradition. The purpose of the overview is to track and compare the underlying lexicographical and lingvo-didactic trends from the beginning of the 20th century until now and to define the criteria for making a list that would match the expectations of the modern user. The first section of the article provides a definition of the notion lexical minimum and introduces the parameters of comparison for the wordlists under discussion. By lexical minimum we understand not only foreign learners’ list but more broadly any wordlist which is compiled by minimization of the lexicon on the basis of statistical, pragmatic or mixed criteria. The wordlists are compared across four parameters: purpose of the list (general service list, theoretical, lingvo-didactic), approach to compilation (statistical, pragmatic, mixed), sources of data (corpora, textbooks, questionnaires etc.) and text coverage in percent. The second section discusses the existing approaches to the lexical minima compilation in Russia with emphasis on pedagogical aspects which are prominent in the Russian tradition. The second section discusses the approaches used in German and English lexicographical traditions focusing on the problem of defining core vocabulary and compiling general service lists. The closing section of the article compares Russian and foreign traditions and summarizes the overview. The present overview suggests that the creation of minimal vocabulary lists requires a combination of both statistical and communicatively oriented methods. In addition to that, given the recent development of large corpora the new challenge arises as to provide a stylistically diverse and balanced corpus or a number of corpora that would serve as a proper vocabulary basis for a vocabulary list. Thus, in addition to the fiction texts, authors should include oral corpus data, as well as newspaper, art and academic sources, and internet speech.

Keywords
lexical minima, word list, corpus linguistics, Russian language, word list criteria, word dispersion, frequency, distribution, lexical overlap