Lexicographic codification of English-based synonyms in Serbian

LexicographiccodificationofEnglish-basedsynonyms inSerbianMira Mili (Novi Sad) 1.IntroductionEven though most authors accept the fact that a certain level of contrast is inherent to synonymy, it seems that the range of differential features between synonyms varies according to various authors.Most likely for this reason, there are as many dictionaries of synonyms as there are different theoretical approaches to synonymy.The fact that the proposed lexicographic model deals with English-based synonyms in Serbian, puts additional culturally specific lexicographic requirements in terms of adaptation of the borrowed elements according to the Serbian standard by specifying semantic contents of anglicisms in order to justify their synonymous status in the Serbian lexicon.Thus the lexicographic model proposed in section 4 of this paper is based on the corpus-based theoretical approach to synonymy as well as comparative analysis of several dictionaries of synonyms in English, Croatian, Russian, and Serbian.The corpus is compiled from print media and a selection of literary texts by three Serbian authors. 2.DefinitionofanglicismsandsynonymyThe fact that lexical entries of the lexicographic model to be presented below are English-based synonyms in Serbian puts a reasonable requirement to define the key concepts of anglicism and synonymy, especially in the context of English-Serbian language contact.The concept of an anglicism is broadly defined as any lexical item in Serbian borrowed from English (Filipovi 1986: 192).However, this analysis calls for a more detailed definition of an anglicism, which, according to Pri (2005: 145), includes not only lexical units but also syntactic ones.Firstly,