The lexicographic legacy of Professor B. A. Larin and modern lexicography (to the 130th anniversary of the birth)

The paper examines the lexicographic legacy left by Professor B. A. Larin (1893–1964). It also points out the direct correlation between Larin’s ideas and the controversial issues and moot points in modern lexicography. 

I provide a brief review of B. A. Larin’s biography and his philological interests. The conclusion underscores the significance of the lexicographic ideas in the linguist’s works as well as the versatility of his scientific interests. At the same time, they are united by such cross-cutting leitmotifs as a broad historical perspective, studying colloquial speech in its various manifestations, attention to semantics. B. A. Larin’s ideas that were far ahead of their time are identified as a result of comparing the concepts he developed and the directions of modern lexicography evolution. For example, one such idea is a complete dictionary. It directly correlates with the currently relevant project of a complex (universal) dictionary. Moreover, Larin raised the issues of combining linguistic and encyclopaedic information in a historical dictionary as well as of scientific illustration of historical dictionary entries, which are still unresolved. The ideas of bilingual author lexicography, onomastic author lexicography, and historical phraseology proposed by Larin have hardly been implemented yet. The paper emphasises that B. A. Larin is one of the founders of Russian historical lexicography. Also, he created such a type of historical dictionary as the thesaurus of one written monument and became the father of Russian sociolinguistics and comparative phraseology. He formulated principles for describing various aspects of vocabulary, proposed a number of innovative lexicographic projects, thus anticipating many modern lexicographic theories and developments.

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