The article contains a historical survey and analysis of thesaurus modeling methods in English lexicography. The research objective is to systematize the semantically oriented approaches adopted to describe English vocabulary at different stages of lexicography development (X—XXI centuries). The author concludes that intuitively compiled thematic glossaries, based on the application of paradigmatic or a combination of paradigmatic and syntagmatic approaches to the organization and description of vocabulary and representing fragments of a “tangible” world picture serve as the starting point of English thesaurus lexicography. The formalization and specialization of scientific knowledge provides a gradual transfer of scientific methods on thesaurus construction, which results
in the departure of the hierarchical approach from the analogical (alphabetic and conceptbased) method of vocabulary organization, on the one hand, and the separation of generaland specific-purpose ideography, on the other. The development of technologies, primarily corpus and text mining, has brought general- and specific purpose thesauri to the level of a product and tool of knowledge engineering. Thesaurus focusing on linguistic data and ontology systematizing extralinguistic knowledge allow for the modeling of subject areas and (in potency) of the world picture in the entirety of the relationships established between ideas and the lexical units denoting them.
For citation:
Vorontsova I.A. Evolution of thesaurus construction methods: from intuitive compilation to ontological engineering: (With special reference to English), Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2023, iss. 3, pp. 64—73.