Mer enn nok er for mye

Abstract

This paper describes a research project at the Dutch publishing house Van Dale during 1994 and 1995. The main goal was to develop a practical working method for corpus lexicography. The second aim was to explore the borderline between general language and technical language. The title "More than enough is too much" hints at the idea that - for the sake of both lexicographer and budget - a corpus should be limited in size. During the project we built a small, but very rich micro corpus with medical texts. Selecting adequate texts, according to guidelines dictated by the profile of the dictionary, will become an important task for lexicographers.