Theoretical Part

Theoretical part (framework) includes a brief literature survey, main relevant sources, main concepts and definitions. You should also critically appraise the available works on the questions under study and face academic controversies concerning problems of terminology and terminography.

In this part you should display your theoretical goals. The methodology is basically one of detailed conceptual analysis. You need to show the knowledge of the basics of terminology, lexicography, terminography and their origins. The basic concepts and key terms touched upon in the research should be discussed in this chapter, the most important issues being the theory of compiling dictionaries, their typology, dictionary components and structure, organization of lexicographic work. You should also give definitions to such terms as source language and target language, macrostructure and microstructure, lemma and equivalent, and explain the distinction between language for general purposes (LGP) and language for special purposes (LSP).

Analytical / Experimental Part

This part of research is devoted to the analysis of your data base. The central element in all kinds of analysis, whatever your data, is categorisation. It involves two basic cognitive processes: looking for differences (variations) and looking for similarities (patterns). Looking for differences is a process of analysis. This means breaking a concept or a set of data down into smaller units. Looking for similarities is a process of synthesis, of generalisation. It means looking for regularities, shared features, patterns. The formation of relevant categories is one of the most crucial and difficult parts of a research project.

The results of your categorizations, generalizations and specifications may be fixed in glossaries, thesauri, or dictionaries of different types which are usually presented in the Appendix.