Bilingual and multilingal Russian-English phraseological dictionaries

The paper looks into macrostructural and microstructural parameters of bilingual and multilingual Russian-English phraseological dictionaries. The dictionaries are considered in chronological order, beginning from the very first to the latest ones. Macrostructural parameters description includes the number of head phrases presented, their choice, order of their presentation. Analysis of microstructural parameters of dictionaries pays special attention to introducing head phrases from the formal viewpoint, revealing their grammatical valiency and lexical collocability, stylistic labels, giving examples illustrating the ways of their use and presentation of synonyms and antonyms. The paper also analyzes the volume and quality of the information unit of dictionary entries. The conclusions are that their volume is constantly extended and the quality of each parameter description is enhanced. Authors of dictionaries published later try to add still more parameters of phraseological unit meaning to be described in bilingual dictionaries.