Modern Chinese lexicography: developments in the field, survey of the main works and analysis of the Xiàndài hànyǔ cídiǎn

This paper aims at illustrating the development of modern Chinese lexicography and the features of one of the most authoritative monolingual works in this field, the Xiàndài Hànyǔ Cídiǎn [Dictionary of modern Chinese, hereafter XHC]. To this end, I will start describing the main steps of Chinese research on lexicography, mentioning the periodization proposed by a few scholars, illustrating the close link between the rise of modern lexicography and specific historical events as well as some tools and sources useful to deal with this field. In the third section I will list and present the main works of monolingual lexicography published in the 20th century whereas the fourth section provides a brief historical account about the compilation of XHC. In the fifth section I will illustrate some issues pertaining the XHC compilation focusing on the wordlist selection and the part of speech labelling, with particular attention to the last two editions published in 2012 and 2016.