슬라브어 단일언어사전에서 공간 어휘의 의미기술

Defining the Words Referring to “Left” and “Right” in Slavic Monolingual Dictionaries

The article examines the definitions of the Slavic words referring to “left” and “right” in Russian, Polish, Czech, BCS, and Bulgarian monolingual dictionaries. Many English and Korean monolingual dictionaries describe “Right” as “the side of your body that is to the east if you face the north” and “Left” as “the side of your body that is to the west if you face the north”. Those cannot be the best definitions because the explaining concepts “North”, “South”, “East”, “West” are more complicated and more abstract than the explained concepts “Left” and “Right”. Moreover, “North” and “South”, on their turn, are sometimes defined as “the right/left direction of your body, if you face the east” in many monolingual dictionaries, making a chain of circular definitions. On the other hand, Slavic and other European monolingual dictionaries share the similar definition of “Left”, describing it as “the side of the body where the heart is located”, which must have begun in Le Dictionnaire de l Académie Françoise in the 18th century and expanded to other European language dictionaries because it is more intuitive and persuasive. As for “Right”, Russian dictionaries define it as “the side that is opposed to the left”, whereas many other Slavic and European monolingual dictionaries describe it as “the side of body where the heart is not located”. The latter description seems to be better and the “heart” also can function as a core concept in defining “Right”. Some Slavic dictionaries distinguish between “the absolute left/right side” with their own inner directions (e.g. the left/right hand, leg, eye, etc.) and “the relative left/right side” varying depending on the observant’s position (e.g. the left/right tree, street, person etc.), while others do not, though they differ in semantic and syntactic valency. The definitions of “the political left / right” are very similar in most Slavic monolingual dictionaries. The Slavic dictionaries written during the Cold War describe “the political right” with negative words, while using more neutral words in describing “the political left”. Some Russian monolingual dictionaries written or revised after the collapse of the Soviet Union continue to define “the political right” with non-neutral words, such as “hostile to the progress (враждебный прогрессу)” and “reactionary(реакционный)”, though now in Russia, “the political left”, such as the Russian Communist Party (КПРФ), oppose to new social and political changes and propose retrospective, reactionary policies. Historically, “Right” obtained positive connotations in Slavic language as well as in many other languages, while “Left” – negative connotations, because the overwhelming majority of people are right-handed. The Slavic dictionaries describe “Right”s derived positive meanings, such as “guiltless”, “correct”, “just”, “genuine”, “noble”, “legal”, etc. and “Left”s derived negative meanings, such as “secondary”, “illegal”, “clumsy”, etc. above all, with the help of their synonymous adjectives¸ but this kind of description is undesirable, because it can cause a circular definition. Though the fixed phrases, idiomatic expressions and derived forms are very important element in a dictionary that can help the users expand their vocabulary, they are added after the given word’s definition only in the Great Dictionaries such as the 17-volumed Russian dictionary БАС and the 15- volumed Bulgarian dictionary РБЕ, and 19-century Russian dictionary СД, and sometimes they even lack the proper definitions.