ON THE DICTIONARY OF SEMANTIC EQUIVALENTS IN POLISH , BULGARIAN AND RUSSIAN

Leksykon odpowiedniości semantycznych w języku polskim, bułgarskim i rosyjskim [The Dictionary of Semantic Equivalents in Polish, Bulgarian and Russian] is the first Polish dictionary which compares semantic equivalents in the largest languages of each Slavic subgroup: The West Slavic group (Polish), the South Slavic group (Bulgarian) and the East Slavic group (Russian). The content of the dictionary reflects the social processes, changes and trends which have taken place over recent years. The dictionary consists of 5 volumes, with approximately 5 000 entries for each language. What sets it apart from other dictionaries is that it ventures beyond the standard vocabulary one might expect from a dictionary of this sort. Leksykon... also contains neologisms as well as realogisms — words which do not often have perfect equivalents in other languages because they are so deeply embedded in a nation’s culture. Each entry in the dictionary offers state-of-the-art semantic and syntactic categorisers, developed by Polish experts in Slavic semantics and aspectology. We consider the dictionary to be an innovation in lexicography, because its open structure enables more languages to be added in the future, including non-Slavic languages. Developed with the use of the most recent methodologies available, the dictionary will constitute a sound basis for lexicographic research in the future, in particular for the development of multilingual electronic dictionaries. In the 21 century, we face two great challenges: to make academic research more interdisciplinary and to build an integrated multinational European community. We hope that our dictionary will help address these challenges by promoting multilingualism and facilitating intercultural communication. The primary language of the dictionary is Polish — the largest Slavic language in the European Union. During the Polish presidency of the EU, a conference entitled Multilingual Competences for Professional and Social Success in Europe was held. It concluded with the following declaration: “Multilingualism is not only part of European heritage, but also a chance to develop a society which is open, respectful of cultural diversity and ready for cooperation”. However, the chief obstacles that prevents the EU from attaining the full integration of its economies and societies are language barriers. This dictionary will help overcome these barriers by promoting Slavic languages. The target audience of the dictionary are speakers of Polish, both in Poland and all around the world: experts in Slavic languages, scholars, lexicographers, encyclopaedia writers, students, etc.


Multilingualism
The dictionary described in this paper contains entries in three Slavic languages: Russian, Bulgarian and Polish.The main purpose of the dictionary is to show semantic equivalents between words and phrases in these languages.Each entry consists of three columns -one for each language.The equivalents are aligned horizontally, so that the equivalents of a source word in one language appear in the same line, as in the example below: abonen|t, -ta; -ci rz.mos.
1. 'ten, kto p laci za regularne korzystanie z czegoś' abonent telewizyjny, telewizji abonent niedoste ˛pny 1.1 Work on the dictionary was based on a number of various data sources: written and spoken texts, our own research experience as well as many inspiring papers and monographs, which are listed in the bibliography.The structure and the contents of the dictionary reflect the changes Slavic languages have undergone recently, e.g. the Russian word апартамент / апартаменты, which is currently used in both the plural and singular form, whereas previous dictionaries only listed the plural form as correct.

1.2
The dictionary consists of 5 volumes (or 10 sub-volumes).The first volume contains around 1 000 entries in one language (letters A -E in the Cyrillic alphabet).

1.3
Examples come from the National Corpus of Polish, the Polish-Bulgarian Parallel Corpus (Dimitrova, Koseska-Toszewa) and the Polish- Bulgarian-Russian Parallel Corpus (Koseska-Toszewa, Satoła-Staśkowiak, Sosnowski, & Kisiel).The dictionary does not contain all the lexis available in the languages.A decision had to be made over which lexemes to include, and this was done on the criterion of frequency.

Structure of entries
The principle that guided the development of the dictionary was that all the languages should enjoy equal status.Nevertheless, a decision needed to be taken as to which alphabet was to be used On the Dictionary of Semantic Equivalents in Polish, Bulgarian and Russian to sort the entries.Neither the Cyrillic nor the Latin alphabet has any substantial advantages over the other, so it was an arbitrary choice.In the end, it was decided to sort the entries according to the Cyrillic script, in the order the words appear in Russian.
2.1 Different meanings of homonyms are indicated with Roman numerals: 'oddać coś w dzierżawe˛' wydzierżawić komuś dom na wakacje It would be undesirable for a verb to be treated both as perfective and imperfective, e.g.арендовать vi., vp.
For Russian and Bulgarian -which have variable word stress -the word stress was marked both in the lemma, as well as in the examples: 2.3 Each meaning of a lemma is presented separately and given a new number.The meanings are ordered according to the frequency with which they occur in Russian.The fact that Russian was chosen does not indicate any superiority -a choice had to be made, due to the constraints of the linear structure of the dictionary.Also, it does not also mean that if a given meaning of a lemma does not occur in Russian, it is not included in the dictionary.The most important meanings in each language for each lemma are presented.If a meaning does not occur in a given language, it is indicated by the phrase brak znaczenia 'the meaning does not occur'.This does not mean, however, that this particular meaning does not occur in the language at all.It only means that the meaning is not encoded in the word that is given as the equivalent of the Russian lemma.If the equivalents for all the meanings of all lemmas in each of the languages were to be included, it would inevitably lead to an infinite number of meanings and definitions, as well as to a potential circularity of description.For the sake of transparency and clarity, the option above was discarded and the formula described earlier was adopted.

2.4
The definitions in the dictionary are composed of simple words.Defining lemmas with their synonyms was avoided.Example phrases and sentences for each meaning of every lemma are provided.The examples come from monolingual national corpora, as well as multilingual parallel corpora.Examples were chosen carefully, so as to fulfil two main purposes: (a) to illustrate typical collocations of a word and (b) to illustrate its grammatical properties, e.g. the valence of a verb, the prepositional and case constraints of adjectives, or the position the word should appear in.The examples often include phrasemes (phrases that are fixed in a given culture but have not become a unit of language yet), sayings and idioms, e.g.abonent czasowo niedostępny for abonent, or Apetyt rośnie w miarę jedzenia for apetyt.
On the Dictionary of Semantic Equivalents in Polish, Bulgarian and Russian

3.2
Semantic labels indicate the stylistic features of words, as well as the meaning of verbs described in accordance with the net theory of time and aspect and the semantic metalanguage developed in Koseska-Toszewa (2006).The net theory stipulates that the form of a verb is either its perfective or imperfective variant, whereas the meaning is a state or a number of states and events that concludes with a state or an event, or a number of events and states that concludes with an event.The definitions of the terms event, state and configuration of events / states are taken from the net model of time and aspect: an event has no temporal duration -it only begins, ends or interrupts states, whereas a state is extended in time and thus has temporal duration1 .The Petri net theory -crucial for the description of time and aspect -is also a theory with a direct approach to the semantics of natural languages (see Petri, 1962;Mazurkiewicz, 1986;Koseska & Mazurkiewicz, 1988, 1994).
3.3 Petri nets consist of a finite number of objects that symbolise states and events, which are connected by succession relations.These proceed either from an event to a state (when an event gives rise to a state) or from a state to an event (when a state concludes with an event).A succession relation does not have to proceed in a linear order; some objects in a Petri net might not be comparable in terms of linearity, when none of the objects precedes another object.A state is a feature of an object in the real world.In the discrete approach to process description, the paradigm of a state is its persistence.Every state persists for some time.Two successive states are divided by an event, which gives rise to a new state and concludes the previous state.In general, an event concludes one state and/or gives rise to another.We can conceive of an event as a point on a temporal axis, because being a boundary between two states, it does not have temporal duration (it does not persist in time).To give an example, the four seasons are states, whereas equinoxes and solstices are events -the spring equinox (an event) is a boundary between winter (a state) and spring (a state) (see Petri, 1963;Mazurkiewicz, 1986).

3.4
The differentiation between states and events is a crucial feature of Petri nets.Every event either gives rise to or concludes a state; two successive states must be divided by an event that concludes the first and gives rise to the second.Analogically, a state always comes between two successive events, even if it is a state of the following sort: "one event occurred but another event has not happened yet".Perfective verb forms have two typical meanings: an event (event 1) or a number of states and events that conclude with an event (event 2).Consequently, an imperfective verb form carries one of the two meanings: a state (state 1) or a number of states and events that conclude with a state (state 2).We can illustrate the meanings of states and events with the aspectual and temporal relation, that is when a verb form conveys a given tense in a sentence (our dictionary provides sentences in Bulgarian, Polish and Russian).As far as infinitives are concerned, our dictionary only indicates whether it is an event or a state.