Synonymy has been discussed at length by lexicology (Bellmann 1968; Harras 2001). The avoidance of repetition and the use of appropriate words in contexts is one of the pillars of textual cohesion. In lexicography, synonymy has been investigated (see Wiegand 1976, Viehweger 1982), but has mainly focused on the readers' perspective to facilitate comprehension, rather than on the writers' for language production (Zock et al. 2010). This has led lexicographers to concentrate more on the addition of words to lists rather than to improve the thesauri's structure and the organization of the entries, rendering them unfriendly tools for production purposes (Chon 2009; Storjohann 2006), thus creating problems for users having to choose synonyms (Murphy 2013; Storjohann 2006). That said, native and non-native learners turn to thesauri for writing purposes anyway (Kipfer 1987; Siegel's 2007; Müller Spitzer et al. 2018). It is the aim of this paper to begin to investigate how German and English thesauri might be redesigned to become better tools for production purposes. This will be done through a series of theoretical and empirical researches based on the use of the current tools available. The first of these, as represented by this paper, will focus on testing the user-friendliness of a series of paper and electronic thesauri by administering a series of synonym-finding exercises to first-year master's students of English and German. The findings of this first step in the research project will be twofold: to understand whether there are thesauri that are already better designed than others and what lexicographical aspects need addressing to improve the tools that are not as efficient.
References
Bellmann, G. 1969. 'Zur Abgrenzung und Terminologie bedeutungsgleicher und bedeutungsverwandter lexikalischer Einheiten', Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung. 35. Jahrg., H. 3/4 (Dec., 1968): 218–233.
Chon, Y. V. 2009. 'The Electronic Dictionary for Writing: A Solution or a Problem?'. International Journal of Lexicography, 22.1: 23–54.
Harras, G. 2001. 'Synonymie und Synonymik'. In: Harras/Gisela (Hrsg.), Kommunikationsverben. Konzeptuelle Ordnung und semantische Repräsentation. Tübingen: Narr, 131–193.
Kipfer, B. A. 1987. 'Dictionaries and the Intermediate Student: Communicative Needs and the Development of User Reference Skills'. In Anthony P. Cowie (ed.), The Dictionary and the Language Learner. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 44–54.
Müller-Spitzer, C. et al. 2018. ‚Eine europaweite Umfrage zu Wörterbuchbenutzung und -kultur. Ergebnisse der deutschen Teilnehmenden'. Sprachreport, Heft 2/2018, 34. Jahrgang: 26–35.
Murphy, Lynne M. 2013. 'What we talk about when we talk about synonyms (and what it can tell us about thesauruses)'. International Journal of Lexicography. Vol. 26 No. 3: 279–304
Siegel, M. E. A. 2007. 'What Do You Do with a Dictionary: A Study of Undergraduate Dictionary Use'. Dictionaries, 28: 23–47.
Viehweger, D. 1982. ‚Semantiktheorie und praktische Lexikographie'. Zeitschrift für Germanistik. Vol. 3, N.2: 143–155.JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23974871. Accessed 7 Jul. 2022.
Wiegand, H.E. 1976. Synonymie und ihre Bedeutung in der einsprachigen Lexikographie. In: Jahrbuch 1975 des Instituts für deutsche Sprache: Probleme der Lexikologie und Lexikographie. Düsseldorf. 118–180.
Zock, M., O. Ferret and D. Schwab. 2010. 'Deliberate word Access: An Intuition, a Roadmap and Some Preliminary Empirical Results'. International Journal of Speech Technology, 13: 201–218.
