Monolingual electronic legal dictionaries: advantages and prospects

Resumen

Today electronic dictionaries are gaining more and more popularity as their advantages considerably outweigh the downsides. The article is aimed at revealing the main features of monolingual electronic legal dictionaries that make them more convenient as compared to their printed counterparts, as well as determining the possible areas of their further development. The research is based on analyzing and synthesizing the theoretical literature on the subject, empirical methods (observation) and the method of classifying the obtained results. The analysis showed that the main advantages of electronic dictionaries from the compilers or editors”™ point of view include unlimited capacity for storing information, selective and frequent update, automatized procedures of organization, systematization, rearrangement of information and data verification, possible use of hypertext. The users, in their turn, benefit from electronic dictionaries due to the speedy, flexible, convenient and user-friendly search. Although electronic legal dictionaries share many of these features, they still require wider hypertext usage, word-list enlargement and dictionary entry upgrade. The results of the investigation can be used to confirm the necessity to develop electronic legal lexicography as a promising field of linguistics.