Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary

Phil Benson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134599585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

This unique work challenges the assumption that dictionaries act as objective records of our language, and instead argues that the English dictionary is a fundamentally ethnocentric work. Using theoretical, historical and empirical analyses, Phil Benson shows how English dictionaries have filtered knowledge through predominantly Anglo-American perspectives. The book includes a major case study of the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and its treatment of China.

1 Dictionaries and theories of language

The argument that English dictionaries are fundamentally ethnocentric rests on a view of the English dictionary as a representation of the English language organised in terms of metaphors of centre and periphery. The process of lexicographical representation, constrained by the rules and principles of lexicographical practice, leads not to the production of a direct reflection of the language ‘as it is’, but to the production of a version of the language, with definite form and shape. This version of the language both represents and conditions our conceptions of what the language is, what it is made of and the ways in which its component parts are related to each other.

The notion of the dictionary as representation implies a theory of the dictionary based upon theories of semiotics, ideology and discourse that will be outlined in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3. First, however, it has to be acknowledged that dictionary-makers themselves do not typically view lexicography as a process of representation. For most modern lexicographers, lexicography is first and foremost a process of description and the rules and principles of lexicographical practice constrain the lexicographer to ‘accuracy’ and ‘objectivity’. Moreover, twentieth-century descriptivist lexicography defines itself as a response to the prescriptivist lexicography of earlier centuries. In contrast to the prescriptive lexicographer, who relies on intuition and arbitrary diktat, the descriptive lexicographer relies on evidence. In this sense, descriptivism is crucial to the self-image of modern lexicography as an endeavour in harmony with principles of scientific inquiry. We begin, therefore, by examining the nature of the assumptions on which descriptivist lexicography is based and their relationship to evolving theories of language.

The descriptivist paradigm

Descriptivism has been described by Moon (1989) as the dominant paradigm for lexicography in the twentieth century. According to the descriptive principle the dictionary should tell the reader what the language is, not what it should be. The descriptive principle is also, in a sense, a moral one since it constrains lexicographers to record the ‘facts of the language’ accurately and without bias and without unjustifiably allowing their own opinions to come to the surface of the dictionary. It places the lexicographer above the interests of factions who might wish to use the dictionary as a site for linguistic or ideological dispute. At the same time it allows the lexicographer to submerge his or her own authority within the authority of the dictionary as an objective record of the language. Descriptivism also prescribes a set of procedures governing good practice, enshrined in manuals of lexicography (e.g., Zgusta, 1971; Landau, 1989), which define modern lexicography as a profession rather than an art.

Descriptivism does not, however, define the dictionary as a form. Indeed, up until the mid-nineteenth century, dictionaries were, with few exceptions, compiled by individuals with interests and careers beyond the field of lexicography, who routinely inserted their own opinions about the meanings and value of words and the ideas to which they referred. In the late eighteenth century in particular, the authority of the English dictionary lay precisely in the authority of its compiler to tell the user how the language should be used. Descriptivism as a lexicographical principle first emerges in Archbishop Trench’s (1857) address to the Philological Society, now taken to mark the origins of the OED, in which he proposed that the dictionary should be ‘an inventory of the language’ and the lexicographer ‘an historian … not a critic’. These succinct definitions of the dictionary and the lexicographer’s role in its compilation would eventually come to stand for the ideal of descriptive lexicography. Simpson (1990: 1961), coeditor of the second edition of the OED, has described Trench's address as a ‘manifesto for dictionary-makers’ and Gates (1992: 268) has described the OED itself as ‘a revolution in dictionary-making’. As a result of this revolution, Gates remarks, ‘the editors of today’s general monolingual dictionaries see their work as a compendium of facts about words, a scientific record of the language’ (1992: 265).

The distinction between descriptivism and prescriptivism in lexicography, and the sharp break between the two phases implied in the idea that the OED was a revolution in dictionary-making, is misleading however. English dictionaries continue to prescribe both explicitly and implicitly. In his preface to OEDS3 (1982), for example, editor Robert Burchfield informs the reader that, on occasion, ‘[I] found myself adding my own opinions about the acceptability of certain words or meanings in educated use’. As Zgusta (1989: 76) points out, many modern dictionaries prescribe indirectly by employing usage notes such as ‘frequently rejected, particularly by teachers of English’ and in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AmHDEL, 1969), controversial matters of usage were settled by a panel of 100 writers and educators, whose opinions were reported in percentage form. The distinction between description and prescription is also one that tends to ignore the implications of the institutional authority that dictionaries often claim for themselves. For Taylor, descriptive statements of lexicographical meaning such as those given in the OED are not descriptions of facts, but rather statements of norms:

To present normative statements of word meaning not as such, but rather as descriptions of some institutional state of affairs, amounts only to a deceptive way of attempting to enforce their normative authority: namely, by denying that their authority comes from any other source than a purported correspondence to the truth.

(Taylor, 1990: 25)

Both descriptive and prescriptive lexicographers purport to tell the truth about the meanings of words (and in practice their definitions rarely differ either in content or form). The difference between the two lies mainly in the ways in which this truth is conceptualised as fact or norm.

Nevertheless the break between the prescriptive and descriptive dictionary is crucial to the self-image of the modern dictionary. The important distinction, however, lies not so much in whether the modern dictionary prescribes or not as in the basis on which it claims authority. As Sinclair, editor of Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (CCELD, 1987) (a dictionary that has claimed revolutionary status for itself in its use of corpus evidence), argues:

Eventually, structural statement contains an element of what should be the case, which can contrast with what is the case. Prescriptive studies fall into disrepute only when they ignore or become detached from evidence.

(Sinclair, 1991: 61)

The authority of the descriptive dictionary thus rests upon the lexicographer’s examination and presentation of evidence. Descriptivism thus implies more than the abrogation of the lexicographer’s right to prescribe. The OED was not simply the first descriptive dictionary, it was also the first to locate its enterprise within the discourse of science. The eighteenth-century prescriptive lexicographers, it could be argued, were equally concerned with the description of the language, but they shared a conception of language as an object of description that was particular to their time. More important than the shift from prescription to description was the shift implicit within the idea of the OED to a conception of language as object that could be subjected to scientific inquiry.

The conception of language underpinning descriptivist lexicography is illustrated in a definition of the dictionary, cited by Béjoint (1994: 9), from Zgusta’s influential Manual of Lexicography:

A dictionary is a systematically arranged list of socialized linguistic forms compiled from the speech-habits of a given speech-community and commented on by the author in such a way that the qualified reader understands the meaning … of each separate form, and is informed of the relevant facts concerning the function of that form in the dictionary.

(Zgusta, 1971: 17)

The definition is as much a definition of a language as it is a definition of the dictionary. A language consists, in the terms of this definition, of a set of ‘socialized linguistic forms’ common to a ‘speech community’. It consists of separate ‘forms’ with distinct ‘functions’. The dictionary itself is simply a description of the ‘relevant facts’ of the language. The point to note, however, is that the description of these facts is dependent upon the language being as it has been defined. If a language is, in fact, a far more fluid and diffuse object than it appears to be from the definition, the process of description becomes problematic.

Zgusta’s definition of a language, however, is framed within theoretical assumptions about the nature of language that have been widely accepted in twentieth-century descriptive linguistics. The most important of these is the assumption that languages exist prior to, and independently of, their description – an assumption that is crucial to the constitution of language as an object of scientific inquiry. To this extent, Zgusta’s definition is supported by scientific linguistics. This raises important issues concerning the relationship between lexicography and linguistics, however, for the definition of language underlying the definition of the dictionary is essentially a definition of language as it appears in the form of the dictionary. Indeed, if Béjoint (1994: 25) is correct in his argument that ‘the lexis of a language has no concrete existence apart from the dictionary’, the notion of the dictionary as a description of the language ‘as it is’ may be based on a tautology. At the very least, we need to explore in greater depth the role of the dictionary in sustaining the conceptions of language on which it is based.

Dictionaries and the ontology of language

In the preface to his book, The Language Myth, Harris (1981) calls the advent of scientific linguistics ‘one of the most revealing and disturbing episodes in the intellectual history of the twentieth century’. Harris’s critique of scientific linguistics forms part of a growing body of critical work that challenges the assumption that language is capable of objective description and views the practice of linguistics as a historically and culturally situated form of discourse (see, for example, Fairclough, 1989, 1992; Fowler, et al., 1979; Hodge and Kress, 1988; Kress and Hodge, 1979; Mey, 1985; Pêcheux, 1982; van Dijk, 1993; Wodak, 1989). The term critical discourse analysis is increasingly used to refer to this body of work. Although Harris does not describe himself as a critical linguist or discourse analyst, I will take his critique of scientific linguistics, together with that of Williams (1992), as representative of the philosophical premises underlying a critical approach to the ontology of language and its representation in linguistic and lexicographical work.

In Harris’ view, scientific linguistics is subject to two fallacies, both of which have their roots in Aristotelian philosophy: the ‘telementational fallacy’ and the ‘determinacy fallacy’. The telementational fallacy lies in the assumption that linguistic communication is a matter of a sender encoding thought in the form of a message that a recipient decodes at the other end. The determinacy fallacy accounts for the possibility of such a form of communication by an assumption that words are arbitrary signs corresponding to thoughts that are a determinate reflection of objective reality. According to Harris, these two fallacies underpin a mythical account of language and communication:

Individuals are able to exchange their thoughts by means of words because – and insofar as – they have come to understand and to adhere to a fixed public plan for doing so. The plan is based on recurrent instantiation of invariant items belonging to a set known to all members of the community.

(Harris, 1981: 10)

This ‘set of invariant items known to all members of the community’ can, of course, be recognised as the ‘socialized linguistic forms compiled from the speech habits of a given speech community’ in the definition of the dictionary offered by Zgusta.

From the early seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, a number of accounts of the ontology of language co-existed within European discourse. The biblical view, based on the Book of Genesis, that language was a gift of God and that all modern languages were descended from a single individual form persisted well into the nineteenth-century. Indeed this was a view to which Archbishop Trench himself subscribed at the time of his address to the Philological Society. In English discourse on language, the biblical view of language lent strength to the determinacy fallacy, for God had brought the beasts of the field and the fowl of the air before Adam ‘to see what he would call them’, and Adam had (somewhat ambiguously) ‘called them by their own names’ (Eco, 1999: 30). In the course of history, however, languages had diverged and the names attached to things no longer corresponded to the nature of the things themselves. Language had thus become a corrupt and imperfect reflection of reality and the task of language study was defined in terms of the search for the original language through the etymologies (or originals) of words.

At the same time, in the work of empiricist and rationalist philosophers such as Bacon, Leibniz, Locke and the Port Royal Grammarians, language began to be seen not as a divine gift, but as the invention of men. According to Williams (1992: 21), Bacon held ‘that while language was the means of conveying thought between men, nevertheless the existing form of language was inadequate for this purpose’. Moreover, language represented an obstacle to reason. Similarly Leibniz held that existing language was inadequate for the purposes of reason and that there was a need for ‘a world-wide language involving a universal symbolization of thought, free from the vagueness and uncertainties of natural language’ (1992: 22). In his Essay on Human Understanding, Locke held that, although simple notions and words were guaranteed by their relationship to objective reality, complex notions compounded from them were not. The fact that communication was only partly guaranteed by the relationship of language to objective reality explained the possibility of linguistic misunderstanding and manipulation. Successful communication could, therefore, only be guaranteed by the rational metalinguistic efforts of the educated elite.

For Williams, the problem of the relationship between language and thought was crucial to eighteenth-century notions of progress. As progress was predicated on the dual conception of social knowledge as cumulative and enabling, and knowledge was predicated on its expression through language, the imperfection of language was an obstacle to progress. Moreover, the idea of the imperfection of language was shared by both rationalist and biblical philosophies of language, although they disagreed on the route to its perfectibility. The relationship between language and reason thus became a key intellectual theme of eighteenth-century Europe, one that took on a political dimension in proposals to ‘fix’ the language in the form of the dictionary.

The work of fixing the language in the form of the dictionary was carried out in France, Italy and Spain by the Academies. For political reasons, however, England was to have no academy and the work of fixing the language was left to private enterprise and ultimately to Johnson, whose Dictionary of the English Language (1755) was to come to represent, by acclaim rather than fiat, the standard for eighteenth-century English. Johnson’s dictionary will be considered in more detail in Chapter 4. For the moment we may note that his greatest achievements, although both were soon to be subject to severe criticism, were in the areas of definition and etymology. Pointing backwards and forwards at the same time, the dictionary had taken on the work of the search for the originals of words and, more importantly, the rational determination of meaning. Johnson’s dictionary was clearly an idealised representation of the language ‘as it should be’, not a description of the language ‘as it was’. The point to be emphasised, however, is that the dictionary had become the site in which conceptions of language could acquire semiotic form. Lexicography had entered a mutually supportive relationship with linguistic thought, in which philosophers of language provided the dictionary with conceptions of the language and the dictionary provided philosophers with representations of the language as it had been conceived.

From the Aristotelian account of language, twentieth-century scientific linguistics eliminated the assumption that thought was a direct reflection of objective reality and replaced it with a notion of language as an independent system conditioning knowledge of the objective world. Using Harris’ terms, the ‘telementational fallacy’ was freed from the philosophical dualism of the ‘determinacy fallacy’. In the process, however, this fallacy was to lose little of its force. As Crowley (1989) has shown, the idea of the objectivity of language was current in late nineteenth-century England, but it has most often received attention in the form advanced by Saussure. According to Crowley, Saussure established that ‘the world and language are not distinct orders of being but belong to the same ontological order’ (1989: 30). What remains of the Aristotelian view of communication in the Saussurean view is the agreement of the speech community to use an arbitrarily determined set of signs. According to Saussure, however, a language appears to its users not as an agreement, but as an objective fact:

In fact, no society has ever known its language to be anything other than something inherited from previous generations which it has no choice but to accept.… In any case, linguistic facts are rarely the object of criticism, every society being usually content with the language it has inherited.

(Saussure, 1983: 72–3)

In other words, the meanings of words are no longer guaranteed by the direct relationship between thought and the forms of the objectively given world. Instead they are guaranteed by the objectivity of the language system itself, in which words occupy, from the perspective of the language user, fixed and immutable positions.

In the twentieth century, Saussurean notions of the objectivity of language provided firm ground for the rejection of prescriptivism and the rise of descriptive lexicography. Yet at the same time, the Saussurean conception of language itself rests in part upon a lexicographical metaphor for language, as Saussure recognised:

A language as a collective phenomenon, takes the form of a totality of imprints in everyone’s brain, rather like a dictionary of which each individual has an identical copy. Thus it is something which is in each individual, but is nonetheless common to all. At the same time it is out of reach of any deliberate interference by individuals.

(Saussure, 1983: 19)

Here, the speech community is constituted by its possession ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Dictionary Names
• Introduction
• 1 Dictionaries and Theories of Language
• 2 The Semiotics of the Dictionary
• 3 The Centre–Periphery Metaphor in Action
• 4 The Monolingual English Dictionary Up to Johnson
• 5 From Johnson to the OED
• 6 The Lexicography of English as an International Language
• 7 China in the OED: the Wordlist
• 8 China in the OED: Associating Words with China
• 9 China in the OED: Definitions
• 10 China in the OED: Quotations
• 11 Conclusion
• Notes
• References