On multiword lexical units and their role in maritime dictionaries

Multi-word lexical units are a typical feature of specialized dictionaries, in particular monolingual and bilingual maritime dictionaries. The paper studies the concept of the multi-word lexical unit and considers the similarities and differences of their selection and presentation in monolingual and bilingual maritime dictionaries. The work analyses such issues as the classification of multi-word lexical units by their form and syntactic/semantic structure. Two classes of examples of multi-word lexical units are studied and contrasted across a number of languages: true maritime multi-word terms and specialized multi-word terms which include items from the general lexicon.