English Dictionaries

8 Key excerpts on "English Dictionaries"

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  eBook - ePub

  Linguistics for L2 Teachers

  • Larry Andrews(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The moral to the story, I think, is clear: What makes common sense in one culture may be nonsense in another. Depending on their age and experience, this can be a major obstacle for your ENL students.

  DICTIONARIES ARE HISTORY BOOKS

  The language people use changes as they move from one region to another, from one social class to another, and from one era to another. A quality dictionary will provide a record of these changes. Contrary to some misguided popular beliefs, a dictionary is a history book, not a law book.

  When a dictionary is published, it documents the entry word’s pronunciation(s), part(s) of speech, and a history of the entry word’s meanings, at the time of publication. A dictionary, then, is a book that records the history of words as they have been used up to that date.

  More conservative dictionaries also employ a panel of “experts” who provide gratuitous advice regarding Do’s and Don’ts about language usage. I find many of these “expert” commentaries to be elitist and arrogant; they are statements of social or political etiquette and power, not linguistic descriptions of how people actually use the language. This is my view; you’ll need to decide for yourself how useful this information might be, but I hope you’ll agree with me.

  Have you ever thought about how a word gains entry to the dictionary? I can’t provide a complete description of lexicography, the dictionary-making profession, but I can supply a brief overview.

  Most dictionaries are based on previous publications. Members of the dictionary’s editorial staff will “track” words, looking for new words (coinages) and new uses for existing words by reading volumes of popular and scholarly magazines, newspapers, and journals, and by listening to radio, television, and informal conversations. After collecting these observations, notations are made for any affected entry word.

  The “testing ground” for many new words is the general area of slang. Flexner described slang as “words and expressions frequently used by or intelligible to a rather large portion of the general American public, but not accepted as good, formal usage by the majority.”23

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  A Sociolinguistic History of British English Lexicography

  • Heming Yong, Jing Peng(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Fifth, many brand-new areas of study will be opened up and explored, such as the mechanisms of interaction between dictionary and culture, dictionary paradigms and users’ cognitive characteristics, cross-language and -culture comparison, dictionary market and marketing strategies and so on. Researches in these areas will depend to a considerable extent upon the already established theoretical principles and practical foundations in fields of linguistics, cultural studies, sociology, management, marketing and other relevant disciplines, and findings from such inquiries, along with their effective integration and interaction with lexicography, will definitely bring about breakthroughs in dictionary-making and research.

  Finally, owing to more in-depth explorations and deciphering of modern linguistics in socio-cultural systems and cognitive systems of the human mind, lexicography is bound to achieve more significant attainments in areas such as language cognition, lexical acquisition and cultural pervasion and interference. The interaction between lexicographical research and linguistic theories will be further strengthened so that lexicography will reach a new height in both theoretical and practical terms. From the practical perspective, it is obvious from a general survey of the development of English Dictionaries in the 20th century and over the past two decades or so that dictionary compilation is assuming the following characteristics and trends of evolution, i.e. more functional elaboration, formal integration, content localization and regionalization, typological serialization, path internationalization, technological informationalization and brand diversification. These features and trends herald the paths and orientations of development in English lexicography in the 21st century.

  In the 20th century, English Dictionaries underwent their transition from extensive mode of development in the initial stage to elaborate mode in later stages and from single to diverse user markets so as to perform various functions and meet reference needs of different user segments and achieved a series of shifts from single function and general users to equal focus on both general function and users and specific function and users. On the whole they gradually formed their own systems in terms of types, species and brands; their own respective series of types and species and even series of types and species within major brands, which covered both general and specific types as well as general and specific users.

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  Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary

  • Phil Benson(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  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.

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  Using Online Dictionaries

  • Carolin Müller-Spitzer, Carolin Müller-Spitzer(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Table 6 shows that 82% of those who use dictionaries as a resource for research are linguists or have a linguistic background, i.e. particular linguists are able to use dictionaries as a resource for linguistic material.

  Tab. 6 : Linguists vs. non-linguists using dictionaries as a resource for research.

  A special aspect in some responses is that dictionaries are apparently also sometimes used for linguistic discussions as mediator medium (category 4, 2%, N = 12). They are even explicitly designated as “Schlichtermedium” (conciliator medium) [ID: 936]:

  • – Most often, to settle questions and debates with my colleagues and/or friends about accepted pronunciations of words and word origins. [ID: 918]
  • – Sometimes my friends and I dispute the usage of a word - one of us will have used it “wrong” by the other’s definition. In this case, we will turn to a dictionary for an answer. [ID: 254]
  • – To settle an argument on etymology or definition when discussing words with colleagues. [ID: 920]

  Although the number of these responses as a proportion of the total is not high, the few examples show clearly that a very strong authority is attributed here to dictionaries. It can be assumed that such users appreciate sound lexicographic work. The user experience which is reflected here is that dictionaries provide such reliable and accurate information that they are regarded as a binding reference, even among professional colleagues.

  Similarly, dictionaries also seem to be used in connection with language games such as crossword puzzles or when playing Scrabble, and also just for enjoyment or fun (category 5). In 6% (N = 39) of the responses, this aspect arises:

  • – For scrabble When I am bored and me and my friend have a spelling bee [ID: 546]

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  The Routledge Handbook of Linguistics

  • Keith Allan, Keith Allan(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Dictionary of the English Language , which fulfilled the key cultural function of codifying eighteenth-century English with a comprehensive record of the lexicon and extensive illustration of the English literary tradition (see §12.2.3).

  12.3 Thesauruses

  12.3.1 Origins of the English thesaurus and precursors to Roget

  The term thesaurus is neo-Latin, based on the classical Greek word for ‘treasury’, i.e. storehouse for precious objects. But among its various applications in English it is rarely found in its classical sense, and its application by lexicographers to an onomasiological lexical reference was not its earliest English use. From the sixteenth century to the eighteenth the term thesaurus appeared in the title of semasiological dictionaries, such as the alphabetically arranged bilingual Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (Cooper 1565). The term’s application to a conceptually ordered presentation of the lexicon began with Roget’s Thesaurus (1852), yet it continued to be applied to alphabetically ordered language references, as in the American Thesaurus of Slang (1942). Since the later twentieth century, the term thesaurus has been extended to structured information systems created for libraries and information technology (see §12.3.5). Lexicographers themselves use thesaurus in more than one sense, so that alongside its Rogetian sense of being a concept-driven construction of the lexicon at large, thesaurus may refer to a lexical index to a ‘closed corpus’ (Ilson 2010), i.e. a finite language database such as the Thesaurus of Old English , or a published dictionary, as in the case of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary . The term thesaurus is thus polysemous, though its use to refer to a strictly onomasiological description of the English language has been trademarked in the UK as Roget’s Thesaurus

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  An Uncommon Tongue

  The Uses and Resources of English

  • Walter Nash(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Dictionaries present an interesting case. They, like teachers, set out to enlighten, but, like players, often achieve a confusion that might pass for bluffing. The making and marketing of dictionaries is now a thriving industry, and the student has a fairly wide choice of reputable products. In general, the dictionaries we keep on our desks, or have conveniently to hand on our bookshelves, supply information corresponding to the explanatory techniques I have outlined. They offer etymologies, synonyms, categorical definitions, citations, and, as a rule, brief grammatical notes enabling us to understand the paradigmatic forms of the word, how it is used idiomatically, and how it commonly enters into the higher constructions of phrase and clause. They can differ a good deal in the way they present this information, or emphasize one aspect of definition at the expense of another, and that is potentially a source of confusion. Readers are safe enough if they put their trust in a single dictionary; paradoxically, it is the scrutiny of several that produces the feeling, occasionally, of being involved in a scholarly version of Call My Bluff. I have been prompted to test my intuitions about this interesting matter by taking soundings among the dictionaries on my bookshelf. Several are compact, easily-handled volumes of the type commonly known as ‘desk dictionaries’: Chambers Concise 20th Century Dictionary; The New Collins Concise Dictionary of the English Language; The New Penguin English Dictionary; and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. One or two are of slightly larger, less comfortably tractable format: Webster’s New World Dictionary, 2nd College Edition; Collins COB UILD English Language Dictionary; and the Reader’s Digest Universal Dictionary. One, the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, is a bulky shelf-sitter, hardly to be handled without pressing cause

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  Cognitive Lexicography

  • Carolin Ostermann(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  th centuries. Then, the genesis of monolingual learner’s dictionaries will be outlined, focussing on the people who compiled them and the linguistic research they conducted. The last chapter presents the available rival products; it illustrates the market situation and the development of these different products up to today. All of this serves to place cognitive lexicography in a larger context, where it should be seen as the most recent development of learner lexicography inspired by linguistics.

  2.1English lexicography up to the 20th century4

  2.1.1The beginnings: glosses and hard words

  The lexicography of English is practically as old as the English language itself, it can be traced back to the Old English period. During this time, lexicography took the form of glosses: English translations were written above or below Latin words by English monks who were studying Latin manuscripts. These interlinear glosses were later also collected as separate manuscripts (glossaries); one example of these early glossaries is Ælfric’s The London Vocabulary (Jackson 2002 : 31). According to Cowie (1990: 672) , these glosses in Latin manuscripts were “a primitive forerunner of the modern bilingual dictionary”, especially since they were later ordered alphabetically. In this sense, Béjoint (2010 : 52) also sees glosses in the Middle Ages as precursors of common dictionaries:

  The direct ancestors of European dictionaries were handwritten glosses added to Latin Manuscripts in the Middle Ages, in order to help readers who did not have enough Latin to understand the more difficult words.

  The Middle Ages also saw the compilation of Latin-English bilingual dictionaries as an aid to teaching vocabulary in order to help students prepare for higher education at universities, where Latin was the unique language of instruction. An example of such a dictionary is the Promptorium Parvulorum of 1440, with the terms Promptorium, Ortus Vocabulorium or Alvearie often used as titles, and still with the common topical arrangements instead of alphabetical ones. In the 16th century, bilingual dictionaries appeared between two vernacular languages, e.g. the first English- French dictionaries, such as the Lesclarcissement de la langue françoyse by John Palsgrave (cf. Jackson 2002 : 32, Cowie 1990 : 672- 673, Béjoint 2010

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  World Englishes

  Rethinking Paradigms

  • Ee Ling Low, Anne Pakir, Ee Ling Low, Anne Pakir(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  11  

  Lexicography and world Englishes

  Vincent Ooi

  11.1 Introduction

  While the dictionary can be valorised for the codification and legitimacy of World Englishes (henceforth ‘WE’), central lexicographic issues concerning the linguistic treatment of WE lexicons remain: the exclusiveness of a variety label, definitional adequacy, and register labels illustrate some of these concerns. In this chapter, the discussion of such issues is grounded in an examination of lexical items that index their respective variety of English in well-known dictionaries of English. While these items are not deemed to be representative of the entire WE lexicographic enterprise, their examination invites an explanation for the inclusion/exclusion of potential lexical items in the WE dictionary and lexical principles are then suggested for improved codification of WE items in the future.

  A significant development in lexicography nowadays is the increasing recognition of web or e(lectronic) lexicography – as part of reference or information science – and the expected diminution of the print dictionary because of space and pragmatic constraints (see Rundell, 2015). Thus, a more inclusive definition of what lexicography entails concerns “the use of reference and information tools dealing with ‘things’, ‘facts’, and ‘language’ related to the word”; that is, lexicography is concerned with “the theory and practice of dictionaries, i.e., dictionaries, encyclopaedias, lexica, glossaries, vocabularies, terminological knowledge bases and other information tools covering areas of knowledge and its corresponding language” (Fuertes-Olivera, 2017). What we know as ‘the dictionary’ may now be expanded to any lexicographic tool that targets such information: richer and more varied types of word knowledge, types of user, quality of the evidence base (or ‘corpus’), and relevant contextual and world knowledge (see Ooi, 2017). Concomitantly, the term ‘world Englishes’ may be taken to refer to “all or any of the varieties spoken around the world, including British English, and, of course, forms such as Nigerian, Malaysian, or New Zealand English”, with a perspective “usually a national one” (Schneider, 2011, p. 29).

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