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A conception o f language em bodied In th e d ictio n ary

Regan, Vincent David, Ph.D.

Indiana University, 1888

Copyright © 1988 by R egan, Vincent David. A ll rights reserved.

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 A CONCEPTION OF LANGUAGE
EMBODIED IN THE DICTIONARY

Vincent David Regan

Submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School

in partial fulfillment of the requirements
of the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of Linguistics,

Indiana University

May 1988
 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in
partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy.

Professor- Charles S. Bird, Ph.D .

Professor'Fred w. Housenoide^, Ph.D

Doctoral
Committee

Professor Harry Gradman, Ph.D.

Cua/uut R- KuzAoti
fesscM: Eugene Kintgen, Ph.D
 @ 1988

Vincent David Regan

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

iii
 DEDICATION

Simply, to my wife Elisabeth for her understanding

through too many years, to my girls, Alison, Teresa and

Katherine for their inspiration and to my parents, Teresa and

Vincent Regan for their support.

iv
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My debts are many and likely not all encompassed here.

To my dissertation committee chairman, Dr. Charles Bird and

his wife, Dr. Bonnie Kendall, I give my sincerest thanks for

their unflagging guidance and encouragement. Along with

their compassion, I also wish to recognize that of my other
committee members, Dr. Fred W. Householder, Dr. Eugene

Klntgen and Dr. Harry Gradaan. Dr. J. Edward Gates and

Laurence Qrdang provided many helpful and timely suggestions
over the years of this work's crystalization. Outside of the

dissertation proper, various members of. the faculty and staff

at West Virginia State college offered incentive, including

among others, Ton McClure, Dr. Tayoba Ngsnge, Dr. Paul

Casdorph, Dr. Louis Cooper, Dr. Harry Scott and various

students in different linguistics and English classes at
WVSC, including notably Ton Reid, Jennifer Weddington, Any

Young, Karen Clark, Randy Plstore, Angie Smith, Preston

Richardson and Rachel Muhanmed. For her typing, retyping and
relentlessly optimistic spirit, my thanks go also to Paula

Blankenship.

v
 PREFACE
Dictionaries reflect how lexicographers think about

language. How general users of dictionaries view language

formally derives substantially from these lexicographical

conceptions. By the dictionary's very accessibility to the

average contemporary reader and the authority with which he

Invests it in his lexical world, the dictionary functions
indispensably in uncovering a lay conception of language.

Yet, we must be mindful that there is not a direct parallel

between the lexicographer's views and those of the layman.

The dictionary maker, as language historian N. E.

Osselton notes, must "pay heed first to the buyer's
expectations: what goes into the dictionary has depended in

the past {and still rightly depends) on factors social and

historical, as much as theoretical and linguistic."

("History of Dictionaries," 13) The contemporary user,

however, pays heed not to the lexicographer's reasons for his

compilation, but rather to whether it will serve his

practical needs. Osselton writes that the user is as much

entitled as the lexicographer to his idea of what a good

English dictionary should be. {13)
Throughout the historical development of lexicography,
the dictionary makers' conceptions of language have changed

slowly and conservatively. In fact, it has only been in the

modern era that the applied scientists of lexicography have

vi
looked internally at their craft to establish workable guide­
lines and principles for production. Ladislav Zgusta notes

tellingly in his Manual of Lexicography that "one of the

strangest features of lexicography is the fact lexicographers
have only rarely exchanged methodical (sic) experience; it
was not until 1965 that B. Quemada started to publish reports
on which [was] in progress, discussion of the methods used

and procedures applied." (10) Zgusta's very Manual

"enables scholars and dictionary editors
to survey all the common lexicographic
problems and turn to the work of other
editors and to treatises and papers on
particular problems. Because of its
international point of view, the lexi­
cographer for the first time has access
on a world-wide basis to the thinking of
his colleagues and to that the scholars
dealing with linguistic problems related
to his work." (Barnhart, 130)

In 1972, John Edward Gates presented a very lucid

account about lexicographic principles inhering in the pre­

paration of dictionaries. Barnhart writes in review of

Gates' An Analysis of the Lexicographic Resources Used by

American Biblical scholars Today, "he considers the form and

content of a lexicon in relation to the needs of its users,
the formal and functional types of linguistic units that a
lexicon can describe, the kinds of descriptive information

about words that can be given (grammatical, lexical,

semantic, literary, and social), and similar topics." (131)
Other works supplementing Zgusta's and Gates's surveys of the

vii
fundamental principles of lexicography that discuss their
application to dictionary-making have appeared as collections
»

of conference papers.
Lexicography in English, edited by Raven I. McDavid, Jr.
and Audrey R. Duckert (1973) assays six major areas of dis­

cussion at the International conference on Lexicography in

English in 1972. These areas concern the developments in
linguistic theory and technology as applied to lexicography:
(1) lexicon and grammar: theory and practice, (2) dialecto­

logy and the dictionary, (3) pronunciation: theory and

practice, (4) grammar, usage, and the dictionary, (5)
problems of definition, and (6) technology in lexicography.
Problems in Lexicography, edited by Fred W. Householder

and Sol Saporta (1962) collects the presentations of a con­

ference on lexicography at Indiana University in late 1960.

The papers read at this conference concerned (1) theoretical

considerations in the preparation of dictionaries, (2)

structural linguistics and the preparation of dictionaries,

3) practical considerations in the preparation of

dictionaries, and (4) lexicographical problems in specific
languages. New Aspects of Lexicography, edited by Howard D.

Weinbrot (1972) presents papers delivered at the Riverside

Conference on Lexicography at the University of California,

Riverside on areas dealing with the social aspects of

dictionaries from medieval to current times. This work -

viii
this conference, as Barnhart notes, "is primarily humanistic
in its approach and. perspective." (133)
Dictionaries and Their Users, edited by R. R. K.
Hartmann (1979) reproduces contributions to the 1978 Exeter
Seminar on Lexicography which brought together linguists,
lexicographers, language teachers, publishers and users of
dictionaries. This interdisciplinary perspective was set on
a consideration of solutions to practical language problems.

The themes concerned (1) linguistics and lexicography, (2)

the meaning of lexemes, (3) specification of the context, (4)

learners' and LSP dictionaries, (5) interlingual contacts and

contrasts, (6) obsolescence and innovation, and (7) computa­
tional aspects. Hartmann also edited in 1983 a collection of

articles, published as Lexicography: Principles and

Practice. This compilation was drawn from work done at the

Exeter University Summer school of 1978 and 1980 and presents

"a coherent picture of the theoretical foundations and
practical problems of a very wide and complex field." (1)
Lexicographers discussing the art of lexicography have

offered various pictures of language which are connected with

the whole of society and life. As Zgusta intoned in the
introduction to his edited Theory and Method in Lexicography
(1980), "The topic of dictionaries is a practically inex­
haustible one, just as those of language, society and life

are. . .The context of lexicography is linguistics and

ix
society." (3) Barnhart, in the conclusion to his historical

sketch of American lexicography, 1945-1973, points up the

major themes that lexicographers have wrestled with - from
the application of historical lexicography to various types

of dictionaries, and from the results of the study of

psychology in the more careful presentation of facts to "the
rise of linguistics fostering a scientific approach to the
study of language, which has resulted in more observation of

both the oral and the written language as the basis of

dictionaries." (135)

The theories and practices of these lexicographers and

linguists translate loosely into the sketchy language

*

philosophies of dictionary users. That dictionaries have

only been in existence for several hundred years— against the

backdrop of millenia for recorded history--reflects greatly

the profoundness of their impact on present-day lay

perspectives on language. This study will examine the nature
of this impact, attempting to correlate the views of lexico­
graphers with those of users. We are not implying that the

dictionary user's conception of language is formulated

without acknowledgement, however conscious or subconscious,

of the influence of education, social encounters,

occupational experiences and self-instruction. In fact,
these influences are extraordinarily motivating of a lay
conception of language; yet all, to a greater or lesser

x
extent are bound up with the world-view of dictionaries.
This world-view is a multifarious one, drawing from a host of
social and political factors. The consequent lexicographical

presentation is, more than would be superficially obvious,

all predicated on the user's ability to read.
How the lexicographer compiles and composes the
dictionary and how the user makes sense of it depends upon
the social structure in which they find themselves. The
particular practice of lexicographical writing and reading,

beyond its formal or linguistic roots, is in actuality a

social practice which cannot be isolated from other

socializing practices. It is grounded in the beliefs and

customs which accompany any specialized writing and reading

and give them meaning. Since lexicography derives from and
is dependent on written language, its composers strive to
approximate a neutral, objective description of language.
And since the written language has come to command a greater
social prestige in the modern era, users of dictionaries have

learned to value more highly such apparent objectivity,

imparting to this quality in composition an authoritativeness

above their own intuition.

xl
I
j
i
i

Dissertation: A Conception of Language Embodied in the

Dictionary

The dictionary serves many people as a formal, practical and

understandable statement on the structure, content and use of
their language. It can offer linguists much insight into the
general user’s view of language. Getting at a lay conception
with a lexicographical orientation is motivated by the
dictionary’s easy accessibility for the average Western
reader/writer who invests it with as much authority in his
lexical world as the Bible in his spiritual world. This
study establishes first the dictionary's indebtedness to
written language and its maintenance historically of a
formalist, literary emphasis. Such a background developed
from ancient social listing practices of a commercial and
religious nature. The implications and repercussions of
literacy are traced as providing an idealized written
language which has come to stand for what people understand
as 'real' language. The average dictionary user can
misinterpret the lexicographical metalanguage when he
confuses it with the logical and relatively objective style
of the formal language of social and governmental
institutions. Much of the confusability of dictionary
entries stems from issues of feature markedness, the
atomization of meaning, the 'objectness' of words and the
dictionary's officialization of words. This study works
through some of the socio-cultural and political
ramifications that are reflected in lexicographical presenta­
tions and concludes that a full understanding of what and how
people conceive of language derives in part from their use of
the dictionary and from how they have been brought up to
accord the dictionary with an authoritarian position in
language matters. Deriving from this lexicographical
conception of language, dictionary users alter their internal
representation of language along lines of standardization,
the countability and finiteneses of words, the univocality
and indivisibility of word's meaning, and lastly, the
pedagogical underpinnings to language's decoding on a level
of "correctness."

xii
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One: LITERACY AND LEXICOGRAPHY.................. 1

I. Langne, Parole, Ecriture....................... 1
II. Literacy Claims................................ 4
III. Motivations for the Practice of Lexicography... 8
A. Listwissenshaf t ................. .......... 8
B. Formalization of the Written Language..... 14
C. The Interactivity of Language............. 23
D. The Codes of written Language............. 25
E. The Dictionary as Metalanguage of the
Written Language....................... 31

References........ 35

Chapter Two: THE DICTIONARY AND THEWRITTEN LANGUAGE 40

I . Foundations on the Written Word; Presumptions
of Literacy.............. 40

II. The "Hard-Word" Tradition...................... 45

III, Inclusion of Common Words; the advent of the

''Modern" Dictionary........................... 54
IV. The Americanization of English Through Lexico­
graphy........................................ 65
V. The New Lexicographical Philosophy as Based on
Historical and ComparativeLinguists........... 81
VI. contemporary Lexicography's Debt to Structural
Linguistics...... 87

References........................................... 100
Dictionaries Cited................................... 104

collegiate Dictionaries..............................106

xiii
Chapter Three: THE LEXICOGRAPHICAL METALANGUAGE AND
USER'S LEXICOGRAPHICAL LITERACY...........107
I. Background.................................... 107

II. Social Elevation and Authority of the

Dictionary....................................108
III. Descriptive Lexicographical Metalanguage.......Ill

IV. Difficulties for Users and Lexicographers

with the Descriptive Metalanguage; Functional
Sentence Perspective of Lexicographical
Writing......................................127
V. Dialogic Perspective on Lexicographical
Meaning......................................137

VI. Lexicographical Writing's Effects on User's

Conceptions of Language...................... 143

References.........................................146

chapter Four: ALTERATION OF THE INTERNAL REPRESENTATION

OF LANGUAGE BY DICTIONARY USERS’ LITERACY.149

I. Introduction................................ 14 9

II. Language as 'officialized' in the dictionary..151

III. Language as 'authorized' by the dictionary.... 154
IV. Language as 'standardized' in the dictionary..157
V. Language as 'finite' within the dictionary.... 161

VI. Words as objects............................. 163

VII. Words as atomizable and orderable in the

dictionary...................................165

VIII. Words as composed of letters and submitting

to alphabetization........................... 168

IX. Words as univocal............................ 173

X. Language as a static phenomenon.............. 176

xiv
 XI. Language in the dictionary as structure-
oriented and thereby pedagogical.............. 179
XII. Dictionary as all knowledge encapsulated....... 182
XIII. Words as the heart of language................. 186
XIV. Conclusion..................................... 189
References........................................... 192

xv
Chapter One: Literacy and Lexicography

I. Langue, Parole, Ecriture

Dictionaries ultimately arose from a growing literacy in
a certain few languages, with their written words submitting
amenably to cataloguing, once having abstracted the spoken
language in a written format, one is faced with a represen­

tation of language that, while more consistent than speech,

has changed far more profoundly than the explicit aural/

visual dimensions would make obvious.

In the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth,
descriptivist linguistics has claimed to have regarded the

spoken language as the primary system of language. The

*

written language was and still is largely seen merely as a

secondary representation of that system. The relationship of
writing to speech has long been considered derivative, with
the former being a pale reflection of the latter. Saussure

writes in his Course in General Linguistics that while

"language and writing are two distinct systems of signs, the

second exists for the sole purpose of representing the

first." (15) Bloomfield echoes this sentiment in his
Language, with "writing is not language, but merely a way of

recording language" (21), indeed likening it to "the use of

the phonograph, which happens to preserve for our observation

some features of the speech of past times." (282)

This work on lexicography takes off from a sense of

language as not being limited by prescriptivist concerns

Page 1
which appropriate semantic control from the individual. Nor
should it be limited by descriptivist concerns which impart

that control to an autonomous, ideal individual outside

social reality. In reorienting this approach, Stubbs in his
Language and Literacy looks upon language itself as an

abstract system realized in or represented by both speech and

writing. He says that "neither speech nor writing is a
direct representation of the other." (1980: 34) Analyzing

the sociolinguistics of reading and writing, Stubbs

ultimately modifies this view by claiming that, while written
and spoken English (his work's focus) do realize the same

system underlyingly, they have each significantly and dif­

ferently transformed.that language system. Such transfor­

mations chart divergent evolutions, much as Strang concludes

in her introduction to the history of English,

. . .writing, having once started as a durable

record of speech, can take many hours, bear
many relations to speech, and finally, can take
wing as an independent factor in language
structure and history. (1970: 13)

This view of a linguistic triangle opposes the

traditional dichotomy between speaking and writing or the
Saussurlan distinction of langue and parole. This triangle
is an acknowledgement of the forms and functions of an
abstract concept. The abstraction is the language system

which generates two mutually affective, physical manifesta­

tions that also work to influence the underlying source.

Goody reformulates Saussure's scheme and offers a triangle
(Figure 1) not only of a formal arrangement, but one that

Page 2
offers "an indication of vectorial forces." (1977: 76)

Langue (language)

Figure 1.

1m l
Q
< -------------

Parole (speech) Ecriture (writing)

Here both speech and writing are media for concretizing and
broadcasting their versions of the language system. Each
version reflects activity, meaning to say that the speaker

and the writer are acting or performing functions, as are

also their respective opposites, the listener and the reader.
This consequent functionalist approach to language was

taken by Vachek of the Prague Linguistic Circle, whose

abstract framework points to the co-existenc^ of two norms in

the same language.

The spoken norm of language is a system of
phonically manifestable language elements
whose function is to react to a given stimulus
(which, as a rule, is an urgent one) in a
dynamic way...duly expressing not only the
purely communicative but also the emotional
aspect of the approach of the reacting language
user.
The written norm of language is a system of
graphically manifestable language elements
whose function is to react to a given stimulus
(which, as a rule, is not an urgent one) in
a static way. . .concentrating particularly
upon the purely communicative aspect. . .
(1973: 15, as cited in Goody, 1977: 77)

Page 3
This approach to the activities of speaking and writing is
further developed in Vachek's own concept of functional
complementariness, by which both the written and spoken
languages are complementary to each other by largely being
used in different situations and for different purposes.

(1973: 31) This view seeks to establish the value of both

according to the appropriateness of their different

functions. Implicitly, the complementariness points up the

superiority of the one over the other in certain functions

and, of course, the ineffectiveness of the one against the

other in other functions.

II. Literacy Claims

While Vachek's idealization of the written norm will

need to undergo some adjustment regarding its static quality,

the fact of its separate status sociolinguistically provides

the motivation for a treatment of the dictionary along the

lines of a literate practice. The concept of objectivity
allows for a "logical" presentation of meaning, among other

things, according to the classic autonomous model of

literacy. This model, studied extensively in contemporary

literacy research, represents the effects of literacy in

terms of cognitive skills. It treats of the "logical" status

of writing (see also Street, 1984 and Finnegan, 1973) as dis­

tinguished from the "pre-logical" status of speaking. The
logical function of writing and its degree of abstractness

have been motivated by the lack of a common frame of

reference shared by its users as opposed to the interpersonal

Page 4
function of oral language which depends on text to communi­
cate meaning and takes for granted a common point of view.
This autonomous model makes claims on the objectivity
and neutrality of sentence meaning and of texts embodying

'autonomous' meaning that do not change over time and

space. In fact, such meaning depends on the learned
conventions of the writer's and reader's society. Street in

Literacy in Theory and Practice recognizes as problematic

"the relationship between the analysis of any 'autonomous,'

isolable qualities of literacy and the analysis of the ideo­

logical and political nature of literacy practice." (8) In
his 'ideological model of literacy,1 Street notes that it is

the different processes by which reading and writing are both

taught and learned that imbue the meaning of literacy with

varying senses. He thus characterizes his model as a neces­

sarily ambiguous one, stating that "we would probably more

appropriately refer to 'literacies' than to any single

'literacy.'"

Whereas 'autonomous' qualities of literacy have largely

been drawn to develop theories of the cognitive consequences

of literacy in social development, in The Domestication of
the Savage Mind (1977), Goody Introduces and emphasizes the
significance of tables, lists, and bureaucratic devices in
the corpus of literacy. This focus of attention on social

practices underlies and motivates the practice of lexico­

graphy. Social historian Harvey J. Graff likewise develops a

socially based alternative view of literacy in his The

Page 5
Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the 19th

Century City (1979) which contests the common view that

literacy in and of itself will bring about social Improvement
and mobility. He argues that the presentation of literacy as

autonomous and neutral is part of an attempt by higher

classes to assert social control over lower classes. Given
their higher levels socioculturally, the tabulaters and
listers assumed prestige in the minds of those at the lower
levels and the written lists set the standard to be imitated.
Authority attaches to the prestigious and the standard form

of the language evinces similar authority in regulating

language. Noting that schooling and techniques for teaching

literacy are forms of hegemony, Graff finds it deceptive to

represent the acquisition of literacy as leading to greater

criticalness and logical reasoning.

Returning to lexicographers' attempts at objectivity and
neutrality in their descriptions of written language, it is
necessary to consider that these motivations emanate from a
literate and academic subculture with its own interests at

stake. While these efforts could be branded 'false

consciousness1 on the part of the lexicographers, in order to

understand how dictionary users assimilate and interpret

lexicographical material, it will be clearer to recognize

how, as Stubbs initially writes in his Language and Literacy,

"the writing system is deeply embedded in attitudinal,

cultural, economic and technological constraints." (15)
These two considerations will greatly entail discussion of

Page 6
literacy or, in Street's terminology, of "literacies.” As
this will be both a linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis,

we will proceed along lines similar to those suggested by

Basso (1974) for his brief outline of an ethnography of

writing.
Therein, Basso begins by proposing to focus upon writing
as a form of communicative activity, with its structure and
function in society as the objective of analysis. He writes
of the study that
it intentionally goes beyond (code descriptions)
to place primary emphasis upon an understanding
of the social and cultural factors that influence
the ways written codes are actually used. In
this way, attention is directed to the construction
of models of performance as well as to models of
competence, to the external variables that shape
the activity of writing as well as to the con­
ceptual grammars that make this activity possible.
(426)

Acts of writing or writing events— in our case, lexico­

graphical writing— will be analyzed in terms of the relation­
ships that hold among the different components that comprise

lexicographical activity.
our initial concern in this chapter will be the moti­

vation for the practice of English lexicography in

particular, along with the growing prestige of the written

language and the consequent growing authority of the

dictionary. The written language's reformation of the user's

sense of language will be addressed in considerations of how

the written form subtly alters an individual's internal

representation of language. Passing later in the chapter to
the code of the message, we will examine the lexicographical

Page 7
repercussions of the written language, treating the code as a
metalanguage that is the product of an alienated social act—
the meditated response to overtly conscious written language.

A glance will be also given to the dictionary’s role as

philosophical and methodological recodifier of the
abstractions of written language and ultimately as
contributor to a literate and academic subculture. Therein,

a darker political dimension of literacy will show that even

dictionaries are part of a larger discussion about elitism
and neo-colonialism, authority and standardization. Subtly

and inexorably, even the seemingly innocuous practice of

lexicography can reveal its less than admirable potential.

III. Motivations for the Practice of Lexicography

A. Listwlssenshaft

The dictionary has only been known for a little time in

the history of written language. With writing having been

invented in Mesopotamia around 3500 B.C., the ultimate

development of compiling and cataloguing separable graphic

units came about in the use of writing for administrative or

economic purposes and not for recording or representing

speech. While writing was long seen as "providing speech

with an 'objective correlative,' a material counterpart to

oral discourse” (Goody, 1977: 76), in fact, three quarters of

all the extant cuneiform inscriptions comprise what

Assyriologist D. J. Wiseman notes as "deeds of sale and

purchase, rental, loan, adoption, marriage bonds, and wills

Page 8
together with the ledgers, lists, and memoranda of
shopkeepers, secretaries, and bankers as well as the census
and tax returns which comprise the necessary output of a
highly developed bureaucratic system of government." (1962:
22) This nascent bureaucratic organizing in a written format

worked up into an ultimate lexicographic crystallization.

Early pictographic writing, as developed in ancient

Mesopotamia and being used for "the simplest administrative

notions” (Kramer, 1956: xix), served what was largely a
function of ordering ostensibly verbal units in a discon­
nected way that would facilitate their storage for
consultation. Quasi-lexicographically, this way is rather

different from what we regard as the continuous style of

written composition. The storage facility was drawn not so

much for the mental processing to appreciate the language of

those writing in it, but for that processing to gain access
to discontinous bits of information. The characteristic form
of these notations— the list— is one that rarely shows up in
spoken languages. Literacy or more explicitly the ability to
encode and decode in these inscriptions was confined to a
relative handful of scribes and interpreters. Goody treats

at length in his 1977 work the characteristics of the

presentation of information in the form of lists (Chapter 5:

74-111) and considers the influence of this ancient writing

on cognitive operations. The implications for eventual

lexicographical writing and reading are clear. Goody draws

conclusions remarkably attuned to lexicographical reality.

Page 9
 The list relies on discontinuity rather than
continuity; it depends on physical placement,
on location; it can be read in different
directions, both sideways and downwards, up
and down, as well as left and right; it has a
clear-cut beginning and a precise end, that
is, a boundary, an edge, like a piece of cloth.
Most importantly it encourages the ordering
of the items, by number, by initial sound,
by category, etc. And the existence of
boundaries, external and internal, brings
greater visibility to categories, at the same
time as making them more abstract.
In all these ways lists differ from the products
of oral communication,. . .they stand opposed
to the continuity, the flux, the connectedness
of the usual speech forms, that is, conversation,
oratory, etc., and substitute an arrangement
in which concepts, verbal items, are separated
not only from the wider context in which speech
always, or almost always, takes place, but .
separated too from one another, as in the
inventory of an estate, that runs: cows, 5;
donkeys, 14; land, 5 dunams; chairs, 8; tables,
2. (81)

Not only did these ancient lists embody the one

culture's state of knowledge, they served to extend that
knowledge by provoking a need for the listers to ever refine

their methods of classification. This is especially evident

in the coming of lexical lists as represented in the Sumerian

lexicons and the "Onomastica” of ancient Egypt— abstract

lists more related to passing scribal games than to

activities of inventory keeping. As analyzed by Landsberger
and others in the massive series, Materialen zum Sumerischen

Lexicon, these lexical lists have even given rise to a

technical term for the investigation of what was an essential

part of ancient scholarship— Listwissenschaft. (MSL IX,

1967: 124).

Page 10
 The lexical lists originated, it is conjectured, as
school exercises in abstract problems of classification and
led to an organization of experience and an accretion of
Knowledge. (Goody, 1980: 94) Lehrer takes these games as
exploring semantic structure in a way "to discover certain
relationships among the words in the vocabulary of a
language." (1969: 39) The organization of the words was

according to paradigmatic sets and syntagmatic

presuppositions. For example, the Sumerian listing of words
in the canonical Lu-Sa series (Sumerian vocabulary items as
lu listed on the left side, with Akkadian terms as sa on the
right) included a large number of synonyms and figurative
terms, such as king and queen, kinship terms, titles.of a

secular or religious nature, professional activities, social

classes, states of the human body and mind, etc. (MSL XII,
1969: xi)

However different the systems of classification that are

involved in the various ancient lists, they all break up the

language in ways quite different from not only later

connected writing, but from speech. While oral discourse

imposes a certain symbolic structure on the perceptual world,

writing puts yet another structure to it. That latter
structure, as most dramatically illustrated in listing,
rearranges the articulatory continuity drawn in speech by
taking the words out of their spoken contexts and realigning

them with other words (morphemes, lexical units, phrases)

that share certain features common in their relation to the

Page 11
perceptual concrete world or to some other ordering system.

The phenomena inspiring the advent of writing and their

initial relation to the communication of non-oral information
in Sumerian and Akkadian society are considered here as
significant only indirectly for historical reasons. More

directly, they point up simplistically the need and function

of lists and suggest the effects that listing brings to bear
on the cognitive processing of the codifier and the

decodifier. Most directly, they demonstrate how writing

evolved not so much as the visual embodiment of speech but as
an aid in cataloguing and storing information by reworking

chirographically the system that inheres in speech.

The Western tradition of bilingual, then monolingual
lexicography began in ancient Grecian society with lexical
lists not unlike those from Mesopotamia. As the Akkadian

lists were compiled in explication of the pictographic

Sumerian cuneiform lists, so too were the first Greek
lexicons drawn to provide understanding of a language a bit
distanced in time from the then contemporary Greek. The
first lexicons of Greek attempted to capture the spirit of an

earlier and classical form of the language. These listings

with commentaries importantly were made to clarify the

original senses of a Homeric Greek that had changed very much

over the centuries. As Read notes of this earliest lexico­

graphical work undertaken by 2nd century Atticists, the

"lists of words and phrases (were) thought to be in accord

Page 12
with the usage of the Athenians." (1980: 714)
One can see the underlying purpose behind such compila­
tion as the officiallzation of a dialect felt to be most
prestigious. While the epic work of Homer was composed for
oral presentation, its ultimate transcription led to its
eventual glorification among Greeks as the proper form of the

language. This passage from oral to written lent to the

oratory of Homer a greater consciousness of form and formali­

zation for the reading audience. Charlton Laird notes

appropriately, while writing of early bilingual dictionaries

that "they were calculated to help people ignorant of a

language or a dialect of it, in this case a social dialect,
learn the speech of the supposedly best people." (xv) The

standardized form for the works of Homer, set in metrical

composition and rhythmic utterances, can be related to what
Maurice Bloch sees as "formalized speech acts" (1975: 13),

and qualified as "the language of traditional authority."

The process toward formalization and standardization,
while inherent in the transliteration and dissemination of
oralized literary work, is reflect most boldly in the com­
position of lexicons that decontextualized connected speech

and writing. The lexical units compiled by the first century

Pamphilus of Alexandria through those of Hesychius of

Alexandria in the fifth century were abstracted from the
reality of actual production. They worked to assure for the
chirographic representation of the language a new and con­

ceptual reality.

Page 13
 B. Formalization of the Written Language
Considering the natural process of custom and tradition
in the cultural development of people and the rising prestige
accorded those regarded as superior, it is not difficult to
understand how the linguistic authority inhering in the "best
writers" would transfer to the work which lists their words,
with their contextualized senses. What this reflects in a
literate community is the social priority of the written
language. While the spoken language obviously has chronolo­

gical priority over the written, it also may be contended as

Householder (1971) has done that writing does maintain some

sort of logical priority over speaking in a literate society.

Debate on the relative priority of the one form of the
language over the other temporally or logically may very well

divert attention from the critical point here concerning the

far greater social significance of the written language in
today's Western society, speech and writing in a literate

society operate on largely different functional levels.

Although neither is superior to the other, it can be quite

easily demonstrated that the written language bears more
substantial value for its users politically and economically

as an instrument of communication than the spoken counter­

part. Nonetheless, it goes without necessarily saying that

there are certainly some people whose oral presentation out­

weighs their written, especially on familiar levels as in

music, entertainment and social gatherings. Consider

Householder's reflection on one particular attitude of, in

Page 14
this case, the law: "If I change the pronunciation of my
name, the law does not care. . .; but If I change the
spelling, if, for instance, my name is Kerr/ka:r/ and I
respell it as Carr, pronounced the same way, then I must go

to court to make it legitimate." (253) In law, written

forms take precedence over the spoken. Getting something in

writing is one of the hallmarks of Western law.

Writing thus overshadows speech in a public and official
way, taking on a life of its own. Stubbs refers to the

sociocultural facts of writing's often higher value for

literate people.

The linguist points out that written language

is not superior, just different, and in any case
is, in certain senses, a secondary system. But
the sociolinguist and educationist have to
recognize that in education, it is often people's
beliefs, perceptions, attitudes and prejudices
which are crucial, however false they may be
on objective grounds. (1980: 30)

Consider the number of cases where orality is, in fact,

better than literacy, such as in storytelling, songs, prayers

and games. However, here professional findings on questions

about the consequences of literacy and illiteracy will ground

a preliminary discussion of the value of the written

language. From them, the raison d'etre of dictionaries will
derive. As the development of listing and Listwissenshaft

provided over time the impetus and eventual need for the
phenomena of dictionaries, their understanding, appreciation
and sociocultural need-fulfillment can be explained in terms
of literacy. The interrelated acts of speaking and listening

Page 15
are caught up together in a literate community and are quite
influenced by writing and reading, more so than the converse.
That converse is cogently articulated by sociolinguist
Gudschinsky, long involved with literacy programs in
developing countries— she recognizes the literate person as
one "who, in a language he speaks, can read with under­
standing anything he would have understood if it had been
spoken to him; and can write, so that it can be read,
anything he can say." (1976: 3) The reading and writing
referred to by Gudschinsky relate to those language acts that

are largely presented in swatches of connected discourse,

such as in a dictionary entry but not so in a verbal

rendition of a cooking recipe, for example.
Without her definition undermining the approach we are

taking, it does recognize the spoken language as primary in

an unsimplistic way. That way does not imply necessarily
that reading is the decodification of speech but clearly does

unite the written language with the spoken. Since our

approach is a functional one, we will formally state that
reading with understanding is possible without a reversion

mentally to the spoken language. The practice of reading is,

at base, an exercise in meaning or, more precisely, the

understanding of meaning. Lexicographer Thorndyke notes this

in his seminal 1917 article, "Reading as Reasoning" and that

writing and speech entail different problems for

comprehension because they are ultimately organized in dif­

ferent ways cognitively.

Page 16
 Writing, as one of its functions, fulfills a human need
to store information. As was fundamental with the making of

lists, basic writing outfits its writer and reader with

information that is relatively precise, permanent and trans­
ferable. And so, one writes to record; he does not do so
merely to transcribe spoken language— that is later

historically, albeit secondarily with regard to creative com­

position. While speech largely takes place without the
speaker's self-acknowledged overt and ongoing critical
analysis, writing is largely conscious in the sense that the
writer treats his comments from a distance with greater or

lesser reflection. This physical distancing, inhering in the

spatiality of writing as opposed to the temporality of
speech, leads to another function of writing— a formally

educational one. Pedagogy, at least in the West, is

practiced primarily via the written word.

Not to imply the absence of rationality philosophically
in spoken language, here we are invoking the intellectual
developments and gains that have been realized in writing as
a mode of communication. As it developed, writing and its

reading were monopolized by the few highly privileged

guardians of traditional modes of behavior and thinking for

their groups. The power of written symbols was reflected in

their use as tools for the keeping of accounts and the main­
tenance and elaboration of the traditional modes. With the
learning of literacy first for the early Greek intelligentsia

and then for the larger Greek society, writing emancipated

Page 17
thought from the waning "paralysing control of an organized
priestcraft" (Fisher, 1936: 19. See also Havelock, 1961,

1973). In carothers1 analysis of culture, psychiatry and the

written word, he draws the conclusion that this emancipation

of thought "derived from the fact that this group (i.e., the
intelligentsia), was literate, and so had the benefit of
knowing what other people thought. . ." (313) From Plato,
insofar as his thinking can be considered representative of
the thinking of the Greeks, the word, as Carothers continues,
came to be regarded as the fount and origin
not only of behavior but of all discovery:
it was the only key to knowledge, and thought
alone— in words or figures— could unlock all
doors for understanding the world. In a sense,
indeed, the power of words or other visual
symbols became greater than before, for,
whereas previously it is likely that hearing
was believing, now verbal and mathematical
thought became the only truth, and the
sensory world came to bt-. regarded as illusory,
except insofar as thoughts were seen or
heard. (313)

Written records and lists encouraged the development of

mathematics, needed as those records were for trade and com­
merce. Chronological listings of natural, physical events
led to the formulation and study of astronomy. The very
concept of linear time derives from the ability to list those

events in sequence. (Gough, 1968) Intellectual thought or

that thought embodied logically in syllogistic reasoning, it

can be argued, can only evolve from propositions encoded in

writing, where they can be read and juxtaposed to uncover

similitude, contradiction, entailment and consequence.

(Goody and Watt, 1962) Lexicographically, the printed

Page 18
message and its communication unroll in such analyzing at

both ends.
The accumulation of recorded thought facilitates that
thought's critical consideration because of its visuali-
zability and the expansion of the limits of human memory.
The written language creates what Popper describes as the
third of three worlds of reality, the first two being the
objective world of material or physical things and the
subjective world of minds and consciousness, respectively.

(See Popper, 197 2 and 1974) World Three refers to the

"objective knowledge" of theories and statements in written

language.
Herein, Popper's theory of objective knowledge, while

not to be construed as implying that this knowledge is true,

refers to the autonomousness of its existence--independent of

any one reader. In fact, this is knowledge divorced

ultimately from its discoverer's or its inventor's
ratiocinative behavior and its assimilation by a possible
knower— this is knowledge without a knower. Popper's World

Three does have some ultimately untenable implications

regarding our sociocultural approach to literacy and lexico­

graphy, but its foundation does serve to inject some

necessary considerations into this discussion.

An objective statement is so when it can be constructed

in words— in a form that allows another to examine it criti­

cally in order to confirm or refute its validity. This form

is that of written language because this language is very

Page 19
conducive to methodical testing and comparison. Once written

or printed, the language facilitates a person's consideration

due to its simple visual dimension. While its spatiality
does not preclude the objective knowledge from being received
and assessed orally, as in everyday conversation, written

language's amenability to both the sender's and receiver's

intellectual processing elevates it practically over the
spoken form. (Popper, 1972: 25, 84) The ideas and conten­

tions couched in written language, by Popper, transcend the

individuality of any one composer, taking on a depersonalized
existence as impersonal communication. They largely exist in

and of themselves— permanent, unchanging, disembodied.

Lexicographically, words as written entities operate on
an analytical level and communicate rather uncontextualized

in alphabetically-arranged, vertical listings. The

dictionary— its composition and consumption— reflects
supremely the Popperian implication of the written language

as an alienated social act. The alienation refers only to

the solitariness of its writer's initial composition and its

reader's ultimate appreciation. This is precisely the point

of Popper's World Three--that functionally the written

language, by communicating impersonally and atemporally,
works to abstract the meaning of words and thereby allows a

person an attempt to evaluate and assimilate objective state­

ments .
This is a methodological necessity for lexicographical
writing conceptually. The dictionary exists by virtue of and

Page 20
for the written language. The idealized objectivity to which
the dictionary writer now in the second half of the twentieth
century aspires is, however, ill founded. Sheridan Bakeras
a literary sociologist remarks regarding lexicographical

practice in light of the Webster1s Third International that

for some time, linguistic lexicographers
have been denying that the dictionary Is
prescriptive. Its authority lies only in
its empirically accurate description, they
say. . .But readers will continue to go to
the dictionary primarily as a cognitive
aid— to tell them what the words they read
mean, and to tell them the social para­
meters of the words they are thinking of
writing. (1972: 150-01)
Objective knowledge, especially as formalized in lexico­

graphical writing, does not inhere in the contents of such

writing but in the sociocultural facts of its use in

particular contexts. Rather than fixing meaning on the page,

the written language renders a malleability to literacy. It

becomes multi-interpretable, as opposed to the way authori­
tative oral statements are more narrowly to be understood.

The authority referred to here is that exercised by

traditional religious and political pundits.
The choice of this word ’pundit' is appropriate, for in

John Parry's recent analysis of popular attitudes toward

Hindu religious texts (1982), as cited in Street (1984: 98-
102), he notes that Brahmin control of ancient texts and of

current cultural practice resides in a guru’s being able to

provide his own interpretation of how the Veda, for instance,
is relevant to the practical, everyday world. Parry writes

that "it is knowledge of texts that have nothing to say about

Page 21
dharma ('right conduct') that authorizes him (the guru) to

rule on it. The way would seem to be open for him to say
what he likes." (Street: 100) Here Parry stands literacy in
a perspective subtly different from that of linguistic and

anthropological study— one emphasizing the importance of the

reader of written communication. He comments that thetext

is "like an empty box into which an enormous rangeof

possible contents might be poured." (ibid.) This
constitutes a challenge to the viewof literacy proposed by

Popper.
As regards the dictionary, while accuracy is striven for
in definitions by the lexicographer in historical or semantic

development, the words themselves alter their textual

explanations to suit the current interests of the reader

without appearing to do so. We cannot expect the formulation

of a word's meaning and use in the written language of
lexicography to result in greater objectivity or truth. Words

have meaning only as part of a context, which is to say

simplistically that words gain or derive their meaning by

their use.
The written language exhibits its own elements bearing
what Wittgenstein calls "family resemblances," "a complicated

network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing."

i

(1968: nos. 66, 31-32) These networks lend a certain indis­

tinctness to various terms and concepts, evoking different
meanings in different contexts. There is no meaning that is

the same for every context. Fixed meanings, Wittgenstein

Page 22
contends, are less useful in language because the application
of a word Is not everywhere bounded by rules. With meaning
as use and a word's application determined by the particular
language activity, confusion will arise with the interpre­

tation of a word's meaning in similar uses but under dif­

ferent value systems. What is acceptable in one language
activity may be unacceptable in another.

C. The Interactivity of Language

Socially then, the writer and reader are not of the same
mind and the meaning the former intends in the words on the

page is not precisely parallel to the message the latter

assimilates. As language is of an interactive nature and
largely operates according to a speaker-listener-subject
paradigm (or writer-reader-subject), the words communicated

are valued and adjudged subjectively or personally.

"subject" and "Object" lose their distinctive status

according to soviet language philosopher Bakhtin in what he
styles as a "dialogic" association. His model of language

use is dialogic because of the interaction of the points in

his own altered representation of speaker-listener-hero

(Russ: "geroi," the active concept of subject). Bakhtin
notes how words come to us from other speakers or writers
and, as receivers, our task is to lay claim to this verbal

property. He describes the situation as follows:

The word in language is half someone else's.
It becomes 'our own' only when the speaker
populates it with his own intention, his own
accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting
it to his own semantic and expressive intention.

Page 23
 Prior to this moment o£ appropriation, the word
does not exist in a neutral and impersonal
language (it is not, after all, out of a
dictionary that the speaker gets his words!),
but rather it exists in other people's contexts,
serving other people's intention: it is from
there that one must take the word, and make it
one's own. (1981: 293-294)

The "dlalogism" of language characterizes both the

written and spoken forms of the word. Far from saying that
either form is the truest reflection of the underlying
language system, both manifestations work to communicate
information in particular codes that depend on the function

of the actual language act. Whichever form is used, the

meaning intended by the speaker/writer is influenced by the
very subject of the discourse and ultimately is transformed

into the received meaning of the listener/reader. Meaning is

thus implicit and explicit. Neutrality does not exist in

language. The dictionary when assessed outside of formal

pedagogical constraints, inadvertently reflects this

openness, whether used to illuminate a consulter or act as a
corroborater to his verbal intentions, it makes of language

an ever-versatile vehicle of communication. Language is, as

Charles Schuster notes in his study of Bakhtin, "a perpetual

hybrid which expresses the various contexts in which it

exists." (1986: 597) Words carry with them their previous
and potential significations. Lev Vygotsky, a contemporary

of Bakhtin, expressed it succinctly in his Thought and

Language — "A word is a microcosm of human consciousness."
(1962: 153)

Page 24
 D. The Codes of written Language
The written language has traditionally been viewed as
more indelible or permanent than speech; the spoken language

as ephemeral. (See Elbow, 1986: 283-303 for this traditional

background and further Ideas on the shifting relationships
between speech and writing.) Both media for the

dissemination of language are, in fact, equally indelible and

ephemeral, whereas Ong in Orality and Havelock in Plato

stress the development of writing as leading to the develop­

ment of logical thinking because writing permits a person to
step out of time, to detach himself from the context in which

words are spoken and thought about, for most of us speech is

essentially more indelible because it is more vivid and

dynamic. By its very temporality, speech is irreversible.
When one speaks, the listener hears the words and sees the

talker, experiencing the rhythm, the hesitations, the

revealing paralinguistic gestures, contrary to the flood of
temporary documents in contemporary Western society which has

led to their disposability by readers.

There is a sense though that once words are set down on
the page, they take on a life of their own, able to be con-
textualized differently from how we intended. This forces us

to revise, edit and rewrite. Since the text is quickly

divorced from the writer, he must take nothing for granted in
writing as he must capture credible substitutes for all the
visual and vocal cues that he would give without effort or

attention to listeners. While conversational speech is

Page 25
mostly composed spontaneously and ad lib, in the truest sense
of that phrase, writing is consciously drawn insofar as the

writer composes alone and is addressing no one present.

Because of the functions and situations the written language

serves, it submits to much introspective formulation and

reformulation for and by the composer. Such composition
tends to contain more content words as opposed to structure

or grammatical words. The written text is likely to be thus

more loaded with information. This is, to be sure, a
lexicographical sine qua non.

Bereft of a conversational partner's interaction to

clarify vagueness, the writer must organize his message more

carefully. On the one hand, the greater concentration or

density of information in writing leads to less of a need for
the redundancy conversational speech calls. At the same
time, on the other hand, it is likely to be more difficult to
assimilate in the absence of extra-linguistic context and the

redundancies. A corrective for the reader or dictionary

consulter lies in his ability to work through the density of

lexical words by backstepping and rereading, skimming and

reordering the linear flow of writing. This corrective

allows greater flexibility for the reader in decoding the
vast multitudes of these unpredictable content words— the
open classes of nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives.
Earlier, reference was made to the largely complementary

uses of speech and writing. This is not to say that they are
in free variation according to their function. Yet in

Page 26
Western society, the choice of medium Is often conditioned by
the social function demanding the communication. As speech
naturally restricts the range and number of audience and the
physical proximity of the communicants, writing extends these
bounds. Conversation comes with explicit contextual infor­
mation. The written language of dictionaries is usually
context-free. Aside from personal correspondence, writing
tends to be fairly conventionalized and relatively uniform,
owing to the sociocultural needs for a standardized language

to unit a disparate whole.

The styles of written communication, though hardly of

the enormous variety of the spoken language, almost always
reflect the social role of the writer. Be he an academic, a

journalist, a lawyer or businessman, the writer typically

composes formally and consciously attends to the demands of

what is required of meaningful and grammatical written

language. The writer of information takes advantage of a

specialized vocabulary also.

This specialization of vocabulary differentiates the

social involvement of speaking from the social detachment of

writing. (Chafe: 1982) While speaking typically takes

place between one conversational participant and another

and face to face or ear to ear, writing mostly occurs in

social isolation. Thus the differences between the
situations of speaking and writing entail notable differences
in the extent of personal involvement that figures into the
language used. Lexicographical writing, while prepared for

Page 27
in examination of both written and spoken evidence, is under­
taken ultimately with all evidence presented in a readable
format. Any and all latter-day recursions to tape-recorded
presentations notwithstanding, the dictionary is a language
artifact, not surprisingly inactive without a user's consul­
tation, but socioculturally interactive with a user's

attention.
While writers of any stripe certainly have the time to
select vocabulary appropriate to the social purpose of their

writing, actually, given the predominant functions of writing

in Western culture— those pertaining to the writers' social
roles of teacher, businessman, "expert," lawyer, etc., their
vocabulary is quite restricted and conventionalized. It is
restricted by and large to the lexical and syntactic forms of

the standard written language, a notion whose clarification

involves not only the differentiation of those forms which
have acquired prestige, but also the sociocultural activities
which have been ennobled by the society with prestige and are

performed by a select class of that society. Joseph, in his

dissertation study of the standard language (1981),

designates this as normally "a dialect adapted to serve in

the exclusive functions of an advancedcivilization.” (7)

About its use by speakers and writers, he writes that the

standard language will serve

in a number of important functions— most of
them associated in the prestigious individuals—
in which non-standardized dialects are unable
to serve. Because of this newly-attained,
exclusive, scarce structured capability, the
standardized dialect may gain a measure of

Page 28
 prestige on its own merit, in addition to
that transferred from its prestigious speakers.
Furthermore, not just everyone will be able
to use the standard language. Mastery is
only acquired through study, and a considerate
expenditure of time and energy is involved.
Such difficulty of assimilation gives
the standard additional independently-earned
prestige. (9) (his italics)

The restrictions of institutional writing carry over to

how much the writer can expect of his reader's general
familiarity with the information to be presented. These

restrictions are presumable depending on the degree of know­

ledge brought to the reading by a literate audience.

Bernstein's distinctions between the "restricted" and the

"elaborated" codes of language use (1971 and 1973) are quite

related to some distinctions between the spoken and written

languages respectively and point up the nature of the

constraints on writing in general and on institutional

writing in particular. His restricted code is viewed as
implicit, particularistic and context-bound because it works
by its practitioners' shared understandings about themselves
and the language contexts. The elaborated code is explicit,

universalistic and context-free because of the absence of

shared understandings. Whereas the restricted code thus has
its applications within the family, the elaborated code is
widely used in schools and at work since its aim is in the

speakers' use of explicit language.

A similar distinction inheres in the definitional voca­
bulary used in dictionaries. The restricted code obtains in
learners' dictionaries both for the schoolchild and the adult

Page 29
non-native user of the target language. The Longman

Dictionary of Contemporary English (DCS; 1978) is

written in a controlled vocabulary of approxi­
mately 2,000 words which were selected by a
thorough study of a number of frequency and
pedagogic lists of English. . .Furthermore,
a rigorous set of principles was established
to ensure that only the most 'central* meanings
of these 2,000 words, and only easily under­
stood derivatives were used. (Procter, ed.,
viii-ix)

In contrast, a work like the Webster* s Third New inter­

national Dictionary (W3; 1961) cleaves to the three cardinal
virtues of dictionary-making according to an elaborated code:

accuracy, clearness and comprehensiveness (Gove, ed., 6a).

W3's interpretation of these virtues led the lexicographers

to use a terminology that, for many subjects, can be

adequately and clearly explained to those who have passed

through the preliminary stages of initiation. Editor Gove

remarks of a lexicographical irony in the W3's definitions in

that, since
a dictionary demands of its user much under­
standing and no one person can understand all
of it therefore there is no limit to the
possibilities for clarification. Somewhat
paradoxically a user of the dictionary benefits
in proportion to his effort and knowledge,
and his contribution is an essential part of
the process of understanding even though it
may involve only a willingness to look up
a few additional words. (6a)

Regarding Bernstein's code in relation to formal

writing, the written text cannot fully rely on features of

context in order to be understood. Being context-free

Page 30
demands o£ the writer to express himsel£ in language inter-

pretable in similar fashion by all readers. Clarity is

ideally sought by keeping the reader's attention focused on

new data. Distraction from this information is avoided by

diminishing the force of non-essential words. By non-

essential, we mean not fully related to the topic of a
sentence or to the nominal portions of the comment. The
reduction of diversion is accomplished not so much by
elimination of words, but by the frequent suppression of
animacy in the verb phrases. Verbs such as "be," "consist,"

"have," "entail," "infer," "comprise," "seem," and "become"

deactivate sentences by maintaining the reader's attention on

things— subjects or objects, ultimately this concentration

away from action leaves the verb slots in lexicographical and

institutional writing filled with the lexicalized meta­

linguistic logic of notations such as ”, &, V, , , etc.

E. The Dictionary as Metalanguage of the Written

Language

Attention to the spoken language has only recently been

paid. Before the advent of a practical means for recording
speech late last century, there was always a great difficulty

in studying spoken language. After all, linguists could only

study what they could hear and transcribe on paper— which is
to say, they could analyze only a written representation of

speech. Thus, the longtime concentration on the written

language is both natural and understandable. Language study

inclined toward that of the literate language.

Page 31
Lexicographically, this meant the language of prestige

writers. The language of the less prestigious working and

merchant classes was dismissed by Samuel Johnson in the

Preface to his dictionary (1755) as "casual and mutable
diction,. . .fugitive cant, which is always in a state of

increase of decay. . .and therefore must be suffered to

perish with other things unworthy of preservation."

Lexicography, by and large, is the mediated valuation

of written language. It is a philosophical and methodolo­

gical recodification of the abstract form of language. To
say 'recodification' asserts that the dictionary is at least

twice-removed already from the language. Indeed, this is so.

As there is an underlying system organizing the phenomena of
language which motivates two distinct realizations in speech

and writing, the first-level codifications are then of these

secondary systems. The system of speech works to transmit
the language in the temporal, fluid dimension of sound, while

the system of writing works to convey the language in an

atemporal, discrete visual dimension.
The language as revealed and received in either medium

subjects its receiver to different interpretations of the

same encoded information. By the interpersonal setup of
speech acts versus the impersonality of writing acts, the
information brought by sound come6 in a more dynamic form
than when brought by sight. Visibility makes static active

forms which can only be artificially reactivated by

unexpected or elegant stylistic treatments. Yet while more

Page 32
slowly transmitted and processed, visual Information also
allows the receiver greater flexibility in assimilating the

meaning of smaller portions. For cognitive absorption,

forward and backward movement, vertical and horizontal
movement, scanning and pausing— all give the reader options
beyond the reduced capabilities of sound transmission. The
passage of sound is more or less substantiated only by time,

volume and tone.

A frequent way of clarifying, disambiguating and
defining the written transmission of language is the
dictionary. It operates by the written language so that its

information can be economically {in the sense of streamlining

the informational content of the message), graphically (in
the sense of capturing pictures for the mental eye instead of

sounds synesthetically), mnemonically (in the sense of

assisting the receiver's storage of the information for
future access) and non-contextually (in the sense of allowing

anyone to apply the semantic information according to what­

ever situation or need presented). To each of these

adverbial qualifications, one can draw practical and converse
correlates to the effects of the spoken language and for all,
one can presume even more simplistic advantages and perhaps

disadvantages to lexicographical qua metalinguistic

composition in the written language. Methodologically, the
function and service of this composition is not so much a
concession to the written language, rather it is a necessity

for writing in general— a necessity born of the social

Page 33
hegemony of writing in the civilized world.

Page 34
 REFERENCES
Baker, Sheridan. "The Sociology of Dictionaries and the
Sociology of Words" in Weinbrot, ed., (1972) 138-51.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans, by

Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1981.
____________ . Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.
Trans, by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunlk. New York:
seminar Press, 1973.
Basso, Keith H. "The Ethnography of Writing," in Bauman and
Sherzer, ed., (1974) 425-32.
Bauman, R. and J. sherzer, eds. Explorations in the Ethno­
graphy of speaking. London: Cambridge University
Press, 1974.
Bernstein, Basil B. Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 1.
London: Paladin, 1971.

_____ _________ • "Social class, language and socialization"

in sebeok, ed., (1973) vol. 12, 1545-62.

Bloch, Maurice. Political Language and Oratory in Tradi-

tional Society" London: Cambridge University Press,
1975.
Bloomfield, Leonard. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart,
Winston, 1933.

Carothers, J. C. "Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written

Word," Psychiatry, 22 (1959) 307-20.
Chafe, Wallace. "Integration and involvement in speaking,
writing, and oral literature" in D. Tannen, ed., (1982).
______________ . "Writing in the Perspective of Speaking" in
Cooper and Greenbaum, eds., (1982) 12-39.
Chomsky, Noam. Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper and
Row, 1966.
_________ _____ . Reflections on Language. New York:
Pantheon, 1975.

cooper, Charles R. and Sidney Greenbaum, eds. Studying

Writing: Linguistic Approaches. Beverly Hills, Calif.:
Sage, 1986.
Elbow, Peter. "The Shifting Relationships Between Speech and
writing," college composition and Communication 36

Page 35
 (1985) 283-303.

References (continued)

Emerson, Caryl. "The Outer Word and Inner Speech: Bakhtin,

Vygotsky, and the Internalization of Language," Critical
Inquiry 10 (1983) 245-64.

Finnegan, Ruth. "Literacy versus Non-literacy: The Great

Divide?" in Horton and Finnegan, eds., (1973) 112-44.
Fisher, H. A. L. A History of Europe. London: Edward
Arnold, 1936.

Goody, Jack, ed. Literacy in Traditional Societies. London:

Cambridge University Press, 1968.
________ ______ . The Domestication of the Savage Mind.
London: Cambridge University Press“ 1977.

Goody, Jack and Ian Watt. "The Consequences of Literacy,"

Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1962)
304-45. Reprinted in Goody, ed"! Cl968) 27-68.

Gough, Kathleen. "Implications of literacy in traditional

China and India" in Goody, ed. (1968) 69-84.
Graff, Harvey J. The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social
Structure in the 19th Century City. New YoFK: Academic
Press, 1979.

Grice, H. P. "Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-

Meaning," Foundations of Language, 4 (1968) 225-42.
______ . "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions,"
Philosophical Review, 78 (1969) 147-77.

Gudschinsky, Sarah c. Literacy: The Growing Influence of

Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton, 1976.

Havelock, Eric. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, Mass.: Har­

vard University Press, 1961.

______ _________ . Prologue to Greek Literacy. Norman, Okla.:

Oklahoma University Press, l9?3.

Horton, Robin and Ruth Finnegan, eds. Modes of Thought.

London: Faber and Faber, 1973.

Householder, Fred W. Linguistic Speculations. London:

Cambridge University Press, 1971.

Page 36
References (continued)
___________ . Foundations in Sociolinguistics:An
Ethnographic Approach"! Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1974.

Jakobson, Roman. "Closing statement: Linguistics and

Poetics" in Sebeok, ed. (I960), 350-377.

Joseph, John Earl. The standard Language: Theory, Dogma,

and Socioculturlii Reality. Dissertation, The University
of Michigan, 1981.

Kramer, S. N. From the Tablets of Sumer. Boulder, Colo.:

Indian Hills, 1956.
Laird, Charlton. "Language and the Dictionary" in WNWD, 2nd
college ed., David Guralnik , ed. Cleveland: Wm.
Collins, 1979.
Landsberger, B., ed. Materlalen zum Sumerlschen Lexicon.
Rome: University of Rome, (M S L :~Tx - 1967T, (MSL: XII-
1969) .
Lehrer, A. "Semantic cuisine," Journal of Linguistics, 5
(1969) 39-55.
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Paul Procter,
ed.-in-chief. Burnt Mill, England: Longman, 1978.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. New York: Methuen,

1982.
Ostman, J. You Know: A Discourse-Functional Approach.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1981.

Parry, John. "Popular Attitudes Towards Hindu Religious

Texts." Unpublished MS, 1982. Cited in Street, 1984.
Popper, Karl R. Objective Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon,
1972.
Conjectures and Refutations, 5th ed.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.

Read, Allen Walker. "Dictionary," Encyclopedia Brittanica,

Vol. 5, 1980.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics.
Trans, by Wade Baskin. New YorFi The Philosophical
Library, 1959.
Schuster, Charles I. "Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical
Theorist," College English, 47, (1985) 594-607.

Page 37
 Library, 1959.
Schuster, Charles I. "Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical
Theorist," College English, 47, (1985) 594-607.
References (continued!)
Searle, John. Speech Acts. London: Cambridge University
Press, 1969 .
Sebeok, Thomas A., ed. Style in Language. Cambridge, Mass.
MIT Press, 1960.

Current Trends in Linguistics, Vols. 1-14.

The HagueT Mouton, 1963-73.
Strang, Barbara M. A History of English. London: Methuen,
1970.

Strawson, P. F. Meaning and Truth, inaugural Lecture, Uni­

versity of Oxford, Nov. 5, 1969. London: Oxford Uni­
versity Press, 1970.

Stubbs, Michael. Language and Literacy. London: Routledge

and Kegan Paul, 1980.

Tannen, D., ed. Spoken and Written Language: Exploring

Orality and Literacy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1982.

Thorndike, Edward L. "Reading as reasoning: a study of mis

takes in paragraph reading," Journal of Educational
Psychology, 8, (1917) 323-32.

Ullman, B. L. Ancient Writing and its Influence. New York:

Longmans, Green, 1932.

vachek, Josef. Written Language: General Problems and

Problems of English"! The Hague: Mouton, 1973.
Vygotsky, Lev. Thought and Language. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1932.

Webster's Third New International Dictionary. Philip Gove,

ed.-in-chief. Springsfield, Mass.: Merriam Webster,
1962.
Weinbrot, Howard D., ed. New Aspects of Lexicography.
Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press,
1972.
Wiseman, D. J. "Books in the Ancient Near East and in the
Old Testament," in The Cambridge History of the Bible,
vol. 1. P. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, eds. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Page 38
References (continued)
_____________ . "The Expansion of Assyrian Studies,"
Inaugural Lecture School of Oriental and African
Studies. London: University of London, 1962.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, 3rd
Trans, by G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan,
1968.

Page 39
 Chapter Two: The Dictionary and the Written Language

I. Foundation on the written word; presumptions of literacy

The dictionary is founded on the written word. Such a
foundation entails more though than the self-evidence of its
also being written material. Inherent in its written format
is the presumption of literacy. Beyond simple literacy, its
foundation was laid on the phenomenon of written language.

The representation of speech in such language is the

codification of particular cultural, social and philosophical

practices.
English dictionaries and almost all other language

dictionaries were composed originally (and up to the present-

day) from words existing in script or print. A retrospective

view of the high marks of lexicography's history will serve

to put the ensuing discussion on a firm footing. It will

both illuminate how dictionaries have come to be and how

English language users over time have inexorably bent their

culture and society to conform to the printed word, by which

the dictionary was the inevitable result. The dictionary, as
an historical artifact, is a product of its time. While this
is essentially a cliche, its underlying truth becomes evident
in the technological advance of Western civilization and the

necessity of constant change that obtains a priori in this

civilization.

Page 40
 The monolingual English dictionary came about as a
natural development of the need for understanding Latin
texts. The earliest word reference books for speakers of
English were the bilingual glossaries that provided English
equivalents for Latin or French words. While a case can be
made for the early word lists or glossaria as the direct

antecedents of modern lexicography, more significant for the

development of English dictionaries were the Latin-English
and English-Latin dictionaries of the early Renaissance
period. (Starnes and Noyes, 2) Such dictionaries were

ordered compilations of glosses according to a single

alphabetical list. What is of critical import for the modern

dictionary user does not ordinarily stand out boldly— it is

double-sided and likely to be regarded as rather
unsurprisingly trivial. One side concerns the Latin source

language, the other, alphabeticization.

The 1500’s in Britain saw the secularization of learning
with the beginning of the public school system. At this

time, because Classical or Learned Latin had been the

language of all learning in the West— of grammar, rhetoric,

logic, physics, medicine, law and other academic fields,

there came a need to provide translations for those readers

unfamiliar with Latin. The great increase in English

vocabulary by the wholesale borrowing of Latin terms left the
burgeoning student population ill-equipped to work with the
Latinized English of books. From these practical needs, the

young craft of English lexicography carved out its first

Page 41
guiding purpose--pedagogical assistance. The early

monolingual English dictionaries sought to give their users

understanding o£ material that had been read. The users were

largely members of the elite class (who else enjoyed the

privilege of schooling?}. More particularly, they were also

the women who required the social refinement of literacy. As

Landau notes of Robert Cawdrey's dictionary of 1604, "Because

women ordinarily received much less schooling than men, they

were more likely to need help in deciphering 'hard' words
derived from Latin, or so Cawdrey and other lexicographers
thought, for it was not uncommon to specify women as their

chief audience." (Dictionaries, 41)

Alphabeticization, the technique for arranging words., is

the one almost universally accepted principle of

lexicography. This seems a sine qua non for English
dictionaries. While it was also this long before, in Greek

especially, alphabetical order was prescribed since and

because of the invention of printing. The manuscripts that
provided the material for the first productions in typescript

were almost all of Latin composition. The words within these

formats and their interlingeal glosses were at first arranged
systematically according to areas of interest. This
classificatory or nomenclator system (from the head word of

the 1657 Nomenclator omnium rerum of Hadrianus Junius, a

polyglot collection of Latin, Greek, French and English) gave

way to the simpler alphabetical ordering in newer

dictionaries excerpted from wider-ranging, non-conceptually

Page 42
related glosses. Osselton examines the question of how early
compilers managed to get together a single ordered list of

all the English words that they wanted.

"Simply to sit down and try to think them
up would be a hopeless task, and it is
therefore not surprising to find that
Richard Huloet, the author of the earliest
printed dictionary with the English words
placed first (the Abcedarium Anglico-
Latinum, 1522) put it together largely
by reversing and reordering the entries
of a Latin-English dictionary." ("History
of Dictionaries," 15)

The implications of academic Latin usage and alphabeti­

cization for the dictionary are manifold and interrelated.
We shall be frequently reinvoking these two factors through­
out this study of the user's conception of language. For the

present, consider as social and cultural background the

condition of the Latin language out of which the dictionary

was born, in his seminal 1964 article, "Hostility, Literacy,

and Webster III," Walter J. ong notes of the dictionary that

"it is the product of the cultivation of

Latin (with some Greek, and a tiny dash
of Hebrew) as a basically chirographic
language. . .By the eighteenth century,
the great germinal age for the modern
dictionary, Latin was i a curious
condition. For roughly a millenium,
although it was spoken by millions,
it had been spoken by no one who did
not know how to write it." (108-109)

By his reference to the chirographic or handwritten character

of Latin, Fr. Ong explains that by virtue of the permanence

attaching to graphic representations, Latin is still

generating thousands of new terms, but without any properly
phonetic development. The sound of it was "controlled out of

Page 43
space. . . What was primary (voice) was being totally con­
trolled by its derivative (writing).1’ (109) To learn such a
language is to correlate it to a written model. Thereby does

a language attain regularity.

As happened with the classical forms of Latin in
medieval times when they were removed from orality, the
present-day English in dictionaries attempts to impose a

similar sense of control on its users. That control follows

upon the constraints of the alphabet and the medium of print.
In abstracting oral-aural language to the level of writing

and thence to typescript, lexicographers thereby are dealing

with an ordered, or at least orderable version of language.
John Earl Joseph’s 1985 ’’Dictionaries and the Standard"
elaborates on this view by first noting that "the linear
structure of the dictionary is such that it cannot avoid
establishing hierarchies of spellings, pronunciations, and

meanings, even where no hierarchy is intended." (7)

Lexicographical control of the language at this late

stage of English's development co-occurs with its
standardization. indeed it is arguable that these two terms
are in fact synonymous when applied to modern English, in

the infancy of English lexicography and printing, the control

rested in the hands of early writers who were surely only

partially aware of their contribution to an incipient
standardization, considering the state of the art of the
early English dictionaries, one might be doubtful of any
conscious attempt to regularize but simply of an attempt to

Page 44
translate the many hard words based on Latin. Since the
volume of English words in the fifteenth century was less

than a fifth of what it is today (Whitehall, 3), it was

necessary to turn to Latin and other languages to find names
and descriptions for things no English word referred to.
Landau remarks of this stage in the history of lexicography
and the conscious intentions of dictionary compilers,
"[it] does not include brilliant inno­
vations or bursts of creativity that leave
us in awe. . .it is rather a succession
of slow and uneven advances in vocabulary
and methodology, tempered always. . .by
outrageous promotional blather consisting
in equal parts of self-deification and
attacks on the very predecessors whose
works one has systematically rifled and
without which one's own dictionary would
have been impossible." (Dictionaries, 38-39)

II. The "hard word" tradition

The "hard word" tradition was inaugurated in early
dictionaries as a self-validating reason for being. With an
increasing number of readers, there developed a cultural and
educational function to dictionaries. They strove to enable
"a wider, uniatined, reading public to understanding and to

learn to use the new technical and abstract vocabulary of

learned words, which in many cases thus became less 'hard'

and were assimiliated into the language." (Osselton,

"History of Dictionaries, 16) In a historical context, these
words were needed, though some lexicographers did include an
overabundance of learned Latinisms. Cultural and technical

items and ideas of foreign peoples introduced as novelties in

the English-speaking world have been readily absorbed

Page 45
lexically. Although some of the borrowed words in all
periods of English history came from literature, many entered

in the natural way from the spoken tongues of the people with
whom the English came in contact. During the English

Renaissance, the growth of English was enormous. There was a

conscious effort to enlarge the vocabulary of English to make
the language rival the classical languages of Latin and
Greek. Often translations from these two languages were
couched not in native equivalents (for many there were no
equivalents) but in Anglicized versions of the Latin and
Greek words. Etymologies reflect the society's physical and

intellectual meanderings worldwide. Historical linguist C.

A. E. Luschnig remarks of English’s linguistic heritage, "[We
should] rejoice in the philoxenous nature of English which
has accepted foreign words so readily and not case a snobbish
eye upon them. These immigrant words have given us more
tools with which to forge compounds of various heritage."

(184)
■in deference to Cawdrey as our first English lexico­

grapher, he cannot be indicted explicitly for opening the

floodgates to the so-called "ink-horn terms" that filled the

works of his immediate successors. (Noyes, 600) cawdrey's

concerns, as inscribed on the title page

"A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and

teaching the true writing, and under­
standing of hard usuall English wordes,
borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine,
or French &c. With the interpretation
thereof by plaine English words, gathered
for the benefit helpe of Ladies,

Page 46
 Gentlewomen, or any other unskillfull
persons. Whereby they may the more
easilie and better understand many hard
English wordes, which they shall heare
or read in Scriptures, Sermons, or else­
where, and also be made able to use the
same aptly themselves." (A Table Alpha­
betical!)
were for the explication of difficult but not necessarily
ephemeral or eccentric words. Indeed a fine line to draw,
though Cawdrey did so discriminatingly in his 3,000 word
compilation. Consider a representative cut of hard words

from his letter "0": "obdurate, obeisance, object, oblation,

oblectation, obliged, oblique, oblivious."

Despite cawdrey’s enviable restraint, a tradition was

laid for English lexicography that decidedly influenced

English dictionaries over the seventeenth century. Ronald
Wells conjectures in his study of Dictionaries and the
Authoritarian Tradition that "since readers became accustomed
to finding the meanings of hard words in these wordbooks, the
Anglo-American tradition of lexicolatry may well begin at

this point." (17) While the medieval glossers and Latin-

English lexicographers may well have aimed at teaching Latin

and have downplayed the worth of their native English, the

spread of learning, the diffusion of a noble literature and

closer contact with foreign influences had the effect of
making the language worthy of study. In his 1924 article in

Atlantic Monthly, "On Dictionaries," Ernest Weekly said of

this development that the language "became a subject. . .in­
volving difficulties and obscurities which cried aloud for
elucidation." (783-84) He continued by citing one John

Page 47
Drinkwater: "The English language was, to cultured
Elizabethans, like a newfound and wonderful inheritance. And
they reveled in it, they sported with it in every conceivable
way." (784)
The exponential increase in the English vocabulary
through the Renaissance was surely fueled by the early mono­
lingual English dictionaries. Their "hard words" format was
designed to accord with the needs of a growing reading
public. Those needs also seemed to point Implicitly to a
desire for a broader acquaintance with things extralinguis-

tic. Dr. John Bullokar's 1616 An English Expositour

(teaching the Interpretation of the hardest Words used in our

Language, with sundrey Explications, Descriptions and

Disourses) sought to enrich readers with information beyond

an amount necessary to understand the words in isolation.

Bullokar wrote in his prefatory "To the Courteous Reader,"

"I open the signification of such words,

to the capacitie of the ignorant, whereby
they may conceive and use them as well as
those which bestowed long study in the
languages, for considering it is familiar
among the best writers to usurpe strange
words (and sometimes necessary by reason
our speech is not sufficiently furnished
with apt terms to express all meanings)
I suppose withall their desire is that
they should be understood."

Bullokar's work, characteristic of many 17th century

dictionaries, set out a format calling for an encyclopedic
or, at least quasi-encyclopedic, treatment of its limited
corpus of hard words. He was a doctor of medicine and
included among his entries medical terms as well as those

Page 48
from logic, law, astronomy and heraldry. The 8th edition
(1688) of his small dictionary was brought out with "a new

and copious Supply of words," an "Index directing to the hard

Words by prefixing the common words before them in an
alphabetical Order," and "a brief Nomenclator, containing the

names of the most renowned Persons among the Ancients,

whether Gods or Goddesses, Heroes, or inventors of profitable
Arts, Sciences and Faculties. With divers memorable things
out of ancient History, Poetry, Philosophy, and Geography."
Customary for 17th century lexicography, Bullokar copied many
terms from previous dictionaries (such as Cawdrey's and

Thomas Thomas's Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae,

1588)
Successive editions of Bullokar's and a work by Henry
Cockeram, first published in 1623 played off each other in

competition for public favor. Cockeram's The English

Dictlonarie or Interpreter of hard English words reproduced
many of Bullokar's word lists and definitions and many that
Bullokar overlooked in Cawdrey. In the spirit of these lexi­

cographic times, Cockeram even stated on the title page that

his dictionary was "a collection of the choicest words

contained in the Table Alphabetical! and English Expositor,

and of some thousand words never published by any

heretofore."
His very blatant reuse of Bullokar and the latter's
subsequent reuse of the former's were not at all plagiaristic

in a legal sense as copyright laws at this time were

Page 49
non-existent. Landau notes reassuringly,
"It is not entirely fair to judge seven­
teenth century authors by twentieth century
publishing standards. Anything published
was fair game, and copying was widespread.
Exclusive ownership of published material,
though doubtless cherished, was not a
reasonable expectation if its commercial
value was likely to be great. The indig­
nation sometimes expressed by early lexi­
cographers did not make them stint from
copying others. . .So far as one can judge
from a distance of three centuries, what we
should call plagiarism was then a far less
serious offense. One must think of it more
as a breach of courtesy or common decency
than as theft of property." Dictionaries,
42)

Cockeram's dictionary of 1623 was perhaps even more

Latinized than Cawdrey1s and Bullokar's, including nonce
words transformed from earlier Latin-Greek-English
dictionaries. His inkhorn terms and those listed in other
works, David B. Guralnik writes in his "The Beginnings of

English Dictionaries," "eventually affected English to such

degree that no non-Latinate Englishman could hope to read
many works in his own language unless he was provided with
explanations of abeguitat.E1, bulbulc l , sullevatj.on, and
their exotic kinfolk." (4) Cockeram was frequently
criticized for his inclusion of such terms that likely had

never been used in English. His work also contained a

section of the names of mythological heroes and of the

various flora and fauna. In Cockeram*s prefatory

"Premonition from the Author to the Reader," he remarks of

this third section that

Page 50
 "the last Booke Is a recitall of severall
persons, Gods and Goddesses, Giants and
Devils, Monsters and Serpents, Birds and
Beasts, Rivers, Rishes, Herbs, Stones,
Trees, and the like, to the intent that the
diligent learner may not pretend the defect
of any helpe which may informe his discourse
or practice. . (xv-xvi)

The outlines for past, present and future English

lexicographical work were thus set in the early 1600's:
compilations that, if not intentionally so, sought to enrich
an impoverished English by an injection of lexical terms from
the "more cultured" societies of Latin and Greek. They were
compilations given to annotating "more cultured" or poly­

syllabic hard words. Being printed matter, dictionaries also

lent a permanence or invariableness to the graphic

representation of lexical forms, only existing as such and no

longer of oral generation. The passage from orality to

print, in one sense, revivified moribund etyma that had lost

the temporal quality of actuality in present utterance.

While these outlines applied in large measure to the
first century of monolingual English dictionary construction,

they are equally applicable philosophically or theoretically

to subsequent generations of dictionaries. Post-1700 works
began to incorporate the ordinary words of the language,
albeit words whose sources were mainly the foreign language

dictionaries of bilingual lexicographers who felt an earlier

need for them rather than for monolingual dictionaries.
(Osselton, "John Kersey," 555-61) As dictionaries became

more than simply lists of hard words, attempting to catalogue

Page 51
most of the words of the language In a systematic
arrangement, they codified the form and various meanings of
words. Graphic codification had the effect of a linguistic
imprimatur - a mark authenticating lexical existence beyond
the constraints of actual usage. Conjectural or not in the
realm of language use by real people, a word's appearance in
the dictionary conferred on it for people a momentary sense
of timelessness and regularity. Fr. Ong sees the practice of
literacy at the root of this sense. "The efforts of
dictionary-makers, like those of earlier devotees of the
vernaculars, were powered by a desire to raise the

vernaculars to the regularity of the classical tongues - a

regularity due to their curious domination by chirography."
(Ong, 109)

The written language via typescript exercised an

authoritarian force over the language, as it still does,

willy-nilly, the increasing number of abstract and technical

terms in the English dictionaries brought about both a

comprehensiveness and an encyclopedic nature to them. Larger

folio editions from the late 1600's contain substantial

entries on historical and geographical references. At this
time, the dictionary and encyclopedia had yet to evolve into
distinctly separate genres. (Osselton, 1983, 16) Works like

Bount’s Glossographia (1656), Philips' The New World of

English Words (1658) and Coles' An English Dictionary (1676)

extended their "hard word" coverage to include newer terms

from technical fields - many, just as in the preseng age,

Page 52
contrived by renowned practitioners in these areas on the
basis of Latin and Greek morphemes. In the last unabridged
edition of the New International Dictionary of Merriam
Webster (1961), these technological terms attained a
recognition of their original contrivance, appearing with the
eytmological lable ISV (International Scientific Vocabulary).
Robert L. Chapman pragmatically notes in his "A Working
Lexicographer Appraises Webster1s Third New International

Dictionary" that "anyone who has ever tried to cope with the
neo- and neo-neo-Latinisms and Grecisms of scientific

terminology, fitting them into the orderly set of labels

covering the stages of these languages, realizes at once the

synthesizing brilliance of the conception ISV. . ." (210)

From the subtle impetus of the widening technical

coverage, dictionaries in the 1700’s began to submit even the

common words to similar analytical scrutiny. John Kersey's A

New English Dictionary was the first to open the vocabulary

of the layman to the concerns of lexicography. To be sure,
the common words were selected prescriptively. The title

page of Kersey's dictionary notes his is a "Compleat

collection of the most proper and significant words, commonly
used in the language; with a short and clear Exposition of
Difficult words and Terms of Art." In his preface to the
work, Kersey remarks that his dictionary "is intended only to

explain such English Words as are genuine, and used by

Persons of clear Judgment and good style" and words that are
used "either in Speech, or in the familiar way of Writing

Page 53
Letters, &c.; omitting at the same time such as are obsolete,

barbarous, foreign or peculiar. . ."

III. inclusion of common words; the advent of the "modern"

dictionary
Completeness in dictionaries soon entailed the necessary
inclusion of everyday words along with what has become
standard for most present dictionaries, etymologies. It was

by this expanded version of completeness of the 1721 An

Universal Etymological English Dictionary of Nathan Bailey
that the eminent James A. H. Murray considered it the first
dictionary which aimed to include all English words.
(Evolution of English Lexicography, 35) It can be designated

the first of modern dictionaries also by virtue of its being

the first to syllabify, the first to include illustrations,

the first to give illustrative quotations and the first to

indicate proununciations. Bailey's new tradition all the

more set the dictionary along written language standards,

offering new reliance on illustrative citations and working

within stricter alphabetic control. His title page makes

this regard for proper language understanding explicit:

An Universal Etymological English Dic­

tionary— comprehending the Derivations
of the Generality of Words in the English
Tongue, either Antient or Modern, from
the Antient British, Saxon, Danish, Norman,
and Modern French, Teutonic, Dutch, Spanish,
Italian, Latin, Greek and Hebrew Languages,
each in their proper characters.

And also a Brief and clear Explication

of all difficult Words. . .and Terms of
Art relating to Anatomy, Botany, Physick. . .

Page 54
 Together with a Large Collection and Expli­
cation of Words and Phrases us'd in our
Antient Statutes, Charters, Writs, Old
Records, and Processes at Law; and the
Etymology and Interpretation of the Proper
Names of Men, Women, and Remarkable Places
in Great Britain; also the Dialects of our
Different Counties.

The much argued position of a "modern dictionary"

pioneer, though frequently granted to Samuel Johnson or to

Noah Webster, in all fairness belongs to Nathan Bailey. It
was a copy of Bailey's 1731 folio edition that served as a

basis for Johnson's 1755 Dictionary. Through Johnson,

Bailey's work has thus influenced all subsequent

lexicographical production.
With its first publication in two folio volumes and with
its numerous editions and reprints in quarto, octavo, and

even pocket-sized abridgements, Johnson's Dictionary of the

English Language, however, set the lexicographical standards
that were to dominate the world of dictionaries for another
century. The erudition of Johnson and his eminence in the
social, cultural and intellectual world of eighteenth century
England lent notably to his dictionary's success. Of his

influence, Thomas Carlyle wrote that "had Johnson left us

nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a

great intellect, a genuine." ("The Hero.as Man of Letters,"

On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, quoted by

James G. Basker, "The Irony of Influence: the Example of

Johnson's Dictionary," 1) Indebtedness to Johnson is

enormous, and despite all of Webster's protests that he was

Page 55
correcting Johnson's errors, he depended on Johnson far more

than he acknowledged. Johnson's influence on readers outside

the field of lexicography is quite extensive and examples

abound in the literary world. Basker notes in his MLA

article that it is "small wonder, then, that wherever one
looks, Johnson seems to loom large in the imagination of
later generations; both Becky Sharp and David Copperfield,

two of the 19th century's most representative literary

children, have symoblic and not altogether happy encounters

with 'Dictionary Johnson.'" (Vanity Fair, Ch. 1 and David

Copperfield, Chs. 16 and 45 as cited in Basker, 2)

That Johnson impressed upon his dictionary the stamp of

authority is readily seen in the range and scope of its

influence for the hundred years after publication. As
formidable a mark as he left, it should be acknowledged that
Johnson's dictionary came about as an almost inevitable

result of the need that British scholars and men of letters

felt for an academy that would sanction English usage and

regulate linguistic change. They envied and wished to

emulate the work and prestige of the Academie francaise

j. and
the Italian Academia della Crusca. As Starnes and Noyes
write, "The triumphant completion of the Dictionnaire de
1'Academie francaise
?---- in 1694 made the English uncomfortably
aware of their backwardness in the study of their own tongue,
and from then on the air was full of schemes for improving
the English language and giving it greater prestige." (146-

47) This need can be traced to late sixteenth century calls

Page 56
for a dictionary which would function as a supreme authority
in language. From the perspective of the prior century and a

half's fulminators over a decaying English, Johnson's

dictionary was not so much a brilliant innovation as it was
a well wrought response to an incessant demand. Sledd and
Kolb realistically view the dictionary in this historical

perspective and note the irony of its being "the culmination

of a long development, [with] the culmination. . .so
impressive that the development was naturally forgotten."

(Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, 1-2) They argue that the

Dictionary "gave its age what the age demanded; that, with

few exceptions, Johnson, as lexicographer, asked no

questions, gave no answers, and invented no techniques which
were new to Europe, though they may very well have been new
to English lexicography. . ." (5)

The authority attaching to Johnson, lexicographer

derives greatly from Johnson, literary man. This authority

rests upon two of the most influential features of his

dictionary: his techniques for defining a word and his use
of illustrative quotations from eminent authors. Johnson's

process of reading, annotating and excerpting particular

examples of usage from which he would induce the meaning of a

word has been widely adopted in all kinds of dictionaries

ever since. (Wells, 22) Johnson wrote in his Preface,
"Having therefore no assistance but from general grammar, I

applied myself to the perusal of our writers; and noting

whatever might be of use to ascertain or illustrate any word,

Page 57
accumulated In time the materials of a dictionary, which, by
degrees, I reduced to method. . (Johnson's Dictionary - a

Modern Selection. Ed. by E. L. Mcdam, Jr. and George Milne,

5) Johnson labored assiduously to collect words from those
whose writings he regarded as authoritative in their subject

matter, and if possible, elegant to boot [". . .writers

before the restoration, whose works 1 regard as the wells of
English undefiled, as the pure sources of genuine diction.”

(18)]
Considering the intellectual climate of the day and the
widespread sense of a needed authoritative standard to

regulate language, that any one would submit himself to sucl

a lexicographical task seems implausible. Defoe and Swift

made ill-founded proposals to fix the language and Addison

and Pope went on to actually propose to write such a work.
The latter two ultimately relented. Johnson, however, came
to make the attempt. As he noted in his 1747 "Plan of a
Dictionary," he would undertake to "preserve the purity and
ascertain the meaning of our English idiom." (123) While he

failed to realize his goal, his work gave to English

lexicography the idealized authority many wished for in the
enhancement of the English language. Landau sees Johnson’s
"real achievement [lying] in his success in fulfilling—
grandly— the expectations of the literary English establish­
ment, and through its influence of a much wider segment of

the public, that the English language was every bit as worthy

of study as the French or German." (Dictionaries, 56)

Page 58
 The desire for an academy to oversee English usage

emanates from a conception of language as a physical, seeable

entity— this is what alphabetic writing and typography make
of speech. Ong writes Initially in his review of Webster*s
Third, that "to reduce sound to the alphabet is to. . .think
of sound as something else by converting it [and with it,

time itself] into space." (106) At the time of the propa­

gation of the idea for an English academy in the 17th and

18th centuries, Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek were

languages given great study academically. Latin, especially,

having been the vehicle for academic communication in

writing, was regarded as a flawless medium. It was no longer

subject to change. The study of Latin grammar had been "a

necessary part of earlier medieval formal education," as Karl
Dykema notes, "but the study was a means to an end, the
mastery of the church and of learning." (365-66) Medieval

culture was a manuscript culture, committed to written

commentary, and its faith in an ordered universe led to
seeking such order in medieval Latin. In that era, Dykema
writes, "the grammars could police language because the only

language which was to be written and spoken, free from

solecisms and barbarisms, was Latin, and it had to be learned

out of grammars." (366)

At the time preceding Johnson's dictionary, grammars

were ineffectual in the task of regulating the English

language because its speakers did not learn their English

from grammar books. Being a living language, English was

Page 59
seen rather disconcertingly by many influential people to be
in a state of continual flux. And so developed the longing
for an academy that would Impose an order on English for the
purpose of purifying it.
Indeed Johnson had expressed much interest in slowing
language change in his ''Plan of a Dictionary." He linked his
authoritative conception of a dictionary to a necessary
regulation of the language. In the "Plan,” he concludes by
outlining the task of the lexicographer:

"This, my Lord, is my idea of an English

dictionary, a dictionary by which the
pronunciation of our language may be
fixed, and its attainment facilitated;
by which its purity may be preserved,
its use ascertained, and its duration
lengthened. And though. . .to correct
the language of nations by books of
grammar, and amend their manners by
discourses of morality, may be tasks
equally difficult; yet as it is un­
avoidable to wish, it is natural to
hope, that your Lordship’s patronage
may not be wholly lost; that it may
contribute to the preservation of
antlent, and the improvement of modern
writers; that it may promote the
reformation of those translators, who
for want of understanding the
characteristical difference of tongues,
have formed a chaotic dialect of
heterogeneous phrases; and awaken
to the care of purer dictions, some
many of genius, whose attention to
argument makes them negligent of
stile. . ." (138)
WhileJohnson drastically modified his views of language
regulation and saw that "constancy and stability" were goals

impossible to meet, he nevertheless felt they were goals

worthy of pursuit. He noted in his "Preface" that

Page 60
 "if the changes that we fear be thus
irresistible, what remains but to
acquiesce with silence, as in other
insurmountable distresses of humanity?
It remains that we retard what we cannot
repel, that we palliate what we cannot
cure. Life may be lengthened by care,
though death cannot be ultimately
defeated: tongues, like governments,
have a natural tendency to degeneration;
we have long preserved our constitution,
let us make some struggles for our
language." (27)

As conservative as his notion was of the lexicographer’s

duty to "correct or proscribe" a language's "improprieties

and absurdities," (1) Johnson found oppressive the notion of

an English academy but, by his prefatory explanations/ gave

the impression that he regarded the dictionary as the

ultimate standard in language. This feeling of lexico­

graphical authority has been a common one ever since.
The influence of Johnson's Dictionary and, signifi­

cantly, of his preface to that work brought a new interest in

the sound or the pronunciation of words. The newfound
mentorship of the dictionary extended to all areas of

language and notions of correctness soon entrammeled the

shrinking prestigious domain of orality. Oral influences on

standardizing usages and definitions were discounted. In

efforts to cite the writings of the best authors, lexico­

graphers thereafter dealt with language that existed only on
the printed page or in written manuscript. In his "Plan of a

Dictionary," Johnson wrote of language decay as naturally

beginning in living speech and in order to forestall such

corruption, it was necessary to stabilize the sounds of the

Page 61
language. The attempt to control vocalization and thereby
standardize it fell to elocutionists, the presumed

authorities on pronunciation. Johnson wistfully expressed

his own reservations about trying to stabilize pronunciation,

rhetorically noting,
"who. . .can forbear to wish, that these
fundamental atoms of our speech might
obtain the firmness and immutability
of the primogenial and constituent particles
of matter, that they might retain their
substance while they alter their appearance,
and be varied and compounded, yet not
destroyed. But this is a privilege which
words are scarcely to expect. . ." (128-30)

While Johnson marked only the primary stress on words,

subsequent lexicographers in the latter part of the

eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth

took a keen interest in correct pronunciation. In fact, at

this time, most of the more notable dictionaries of English

gave explicit attention to pronunciation. Prior to this new

phase of lexicographical treatment, other dictionaries, such

as Bailey's 1740 edition of his Dictlonarium Britannlcum,
used marks to indicate not only stress but also the longness

or shortness of vowels.
Various ways were employed in the Johnsonian era by

lexicographers to indicate phonetic quality. William

Kenrick's 1773 A New Dictionary of the English Language sets
out ostensibly to fill the phonetic gaps left by Johnson. As

he patently acknowledges his debt to Johnson in the

"Preface," "With respect to the etymology, explanation of
words, and illustrations of idiom and phraseology, the reader

Page 62
will find that I have generally followed the celebreated
dictionary of the learned Dr. Johnson. . . The present
performance is chiefly calculated to correct and ascertain

orthoepy of our tongue,. . ." (Quoted in Noyes, "critical

Reception," 185) His system of tiny numerical superscripts
from 0 to 16 indexed the phonetic values of vowels. Landau
laments that after perusing such a dictionary with diacritic
numbers, he could only conclude that "eighteenth-century
dictionary users had marvelously acute vision," because "the

numerals can easily be mistaken for Insect droppings,

shredded dots dumped across the page, or the hallucinatory

effect of too many brandies." (Dictionaries, 57)

For all the modern complaints of Kenrick's system, his

contemporaries followed his example in subsequent

dictionaries. Thomas Sheridan in his 1780 General Dictionary
of the English Language expanded this treatment of pronun­
ciation with respellings of the entry words. Along with

diacritical numbers and indication of stress in these

respellings, he gave more attention to the phonetic value of

consonants. Soon after Sheridan, John Walker published his

Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English

Language (1791), a work which Gertrude Noyes deems in her

"Critical Reception of Johnson's Dictionary in the Latter
Eighteenth century" as "undoubtedly the most admirable and

influential dictionary between Johnson and Webster." (186)

The numerous editions of Walker's dictionary attest to such

influence and his pronunciation scheme was mirrored in other

Page 63
dictionaries, even in schoolbooks (Landau, 57). Walker's
main concern, expressed on his title page, was to demonstrate
to users "a consistent and rational pronunciation" that was

by his normative and prescriptive attitudes, "correct."

Of these prescriptive tendencies, the elocutionist and

orthoepist Walker geared his standard of pronunciation to "a

sort of compound ratio" of the usage of "the multitude of
speakers," that of "the studious in schools and colleges" and
that of "those who, from their elevated birth or station,

give laws to the refinements and elegancies of a court.”

(Preface, 5) He preferred to register pronunciations that

"fell under the rule," were "agreeable to the analogies of

the language," reflected "the true sound" of the letters, and

gave less offense to "a polite ear." (Sheldon, 131) Joseph

Friend, in his detailed study of The Development of American

Lexicography, 1798-1864, writes of the British Walker, "when
he is forced by the weight of usage to enter a pronunciation

of which he disapproves, he laments the corruption and

prescribes what ought to be." (30)
This adherence to prescriptive principles derives in

large part from the demands of an ever larger middle class at

the turn of the eighteenth century which was growing more
status-conscious. As Sheldon has shown, in America, "many of

our pronunciations of individual words, as well as our ideas

about proper pronunciation are traceable to walker." (130)

comparing the relative influence of Sheridan and Walker, she

notes that "in about four out of five instances when the two

Page 64
men differ, the pronunciation recommended by Walker has
become the modern pronunciation required by American
dictionaries and taught in American schools." (143-44)

IV. The Americanization of English through lexicography

George Philip Krapp, in his probing look at The English

Language in America (a two-volume study, seminal for early

20th century work in lexicographical analysis), raises a

skeptical point regarding the weight of British pronunciation
influence in early American dictionaries.

"The almost complete uniformity of [then

extant] American dictionaries upon the
point [that is, of certain pronunciations]
is probably due to the influence of walker,
but the very great influence of Walker upon
the making of dictionaries must not be taken
as implying equal influence upon the actual
practice and life of speech." (Vol. II, 78-79)

Krapp's mild admonition serves to remind dictionary

users of the limits to which any dictionary, even in the most

linguistically insecure of times and people, may be credited
with inspiring change. These limits were quite narrow prior
to the revolutionary work of the nineteenth century

historical linguists in phonology and phonetics. Their

influence are manifest only with the dictionaries appearing

around the turn of the twentieth century.

Bert Emsley's study of "Progress in Pronouncing
Dictionaries" reviews the lack of progress as attributable to

the practical success of walker's and his predecessors'

system for recording pronunciation. (55) These British

Page 65
lexicographers' authority in this area was undisputed among
American commercial publishers despite the advances in the
scholarly world. Emsley regards the work of Walker et al. as

belonging to the second of four stages of progress in pronun­

ciation transcription, those being: X. no respelling; II.
diacritical respelling; III. phonetic (but not
"international1') respelling; IV. international (usually IPA)

respelling. Of the (Merriam) Webster dictionaries (from

1828-1934), even the last one at the time of Emsley’s article
had not passed the diacritical stage. (55-56)
To be sure, many and perhaps most of the cases where
dictionaries influence pronunciation are those in which

ordinary people never would hear the word in question, or, at

least, not until they had been it many times in print. In
these cases, such an authority is still highly desirable.

The cases where an ordinary spoken word has had its

pronunciation altered must be very few, and even these we do

not often know enough about early dialects to say for sure
that a given pronunciation is not a true spoken tradition.

(Householder, personal communication, 1986)

American dictionary practices at the beginning of the

1800's were very much built on the achievements of Walker and

Sheridan in matters of pronunciation and on those of Johnson

and Bailey (especially, the 1750 revision of Dictionarium

Brittanicum by Joseph Nicoll Scott) in definitional,
etymological and illustrative matters. The debt of American

lexicographers to their British seniors was impressively

Page 66
large. "The British lexicographical tradition," summarizes

Friend, "had produced in the course of over two hundred years

dictionaries of English which, whatever their defects, were

on almost every count greatly superior to the few slight
American products with their patent lacks." (24)
Percy Long refers to the process of lexicographical
development as one "of accretion rather than evolution."

(32) The direction followed by American dictionary work

worked from the same authoritarianism, then emanating as much
from nationalistic fervor as from similar notions of language

purity that concerned the British.

Despite early American dictionaries of an understandable

bent towards a British status quo, the spirit of the new
American independence worked an inexorable path to the
eventual production of a dictionary of partially new design.

Noah Webster came to embody American linguistic patriotism.

Indeeed, as Friend remarks,

". . .Webster's dictionaries. . .in the
course of the nineteenth century were to
become so firmly established as to make
their compiler's name a national institu­
tion, virtually a colloquial synonym in the
United States for dictionary, and a com­
mercial property so valuable that rival
publishers would fight for decades over
the legal rights to use it on their books."
(13)
In Webster's early writings, especially his Dissertations on
the English Language (1789), he argues for an American
language— a standard for the new nation, because the
geographical separation between England and America would

Page 67
effect and enhance language differences.
Webster felt that the new nation needed a unifying force
and that could be found In a uniform national language. In
Wells' analysis of Webster's Dissertations, Webster regarded
the establishment of an American standard as offsetting the
sectional differences of dialect which would corrupt the
language and lead to political disharmony. (Wells, 56)
Standardization was the impetus behind Webster's proposals

for spelling reform. In an appendix to his Dissertations,

Webster enunciated the need for this reform as essential for

national unity:
"Ought the Americans to retain these
faults which produce immumerable in­
conveniences in the acquisition and
use of the language, or ought they at
once to reform these abuses, and intro­
duce order and regularity into the
orthography of the American tongue?. . .
The advantages to be derived from these
alterations are numerous, great and
permanent. . .A capital advantage of
this reform in these states would be,
that it would make a difference between
the English orthography and the American
. . .1 am confident that such an event
is an object of vast political con­
sequence." (393-406, passim)

Such political concern over orthography by Webster was

attenuated, however, in his first dictionary, A Compendious
Dictionary of the English Language. (1806) In this work, he
avoids the abrupt introduction of great changes in spelling
as well as any change "which violates established principles,

creates great inconvenience, or obliterates the radicals of

the language." (Preface, vi-vii) What Webster moderately

Page 68
does impart is a recognition of what future structural
linguists would regard as a basic principle of language— that

the sounds of a language have priority over their written

representations. He notes also in the preface to the
Compendious that "a correct orthography" would only reinforce
the inconsistency with which letters represent sounds.
Webster writes that "Every man of common reading knows that a
living language must necessarily suffer gradual changes in

its current words, in the significations of many words, and

in pronunciation. The unavoidable consequences of fixing the

orthography of the living language, is to destroy the use of

the alphabet." (vi)

While the Compendious is "an enlargement and improvement

of Entick's spelling dictionary" [A New Spelling Dictionary,

London, 1764— a compilation based on Johnson's work of 1755],
it lacks the lexicographical refinement of Johnson's
illustrative quotations, sense discriminations and
derivations. Webster's definitional treatments in this work,

though clearly an improvement of Entick's dictionary,

nonetheless suffer from their brevity (sometimes only two or

three synonyms) and the running together of senses. Overall,

the Compendious did advance the meager American presence in

lexicography with its introduction of more Americanisms and

scientific terms. In fact, these new words constituted one-
eighth of the whole corpus. (Friend, 18) Other additions
included new legal, commercial, geographical and political
terms, as well as localisms, American Indian borrowings and a

Page 69
group of adjectives deriving from proper names.
His deletions from the Johnsonian works are just as
notable for what they imply of Webster's puritanism and
political conservatism. Webster shrank from including, as
Johnsons didn't, "a multitude of words that do not belong to

the language. . .which have never been used in oral or

written English." (Letters, 286) While he omitted such
unused inkhorn words as advesperate, agriculation,
injudicable, spicosity, raorigerous, tenebrosity and

illachrymable, Webster went so far as to not record "vulgar

words and offensive ribaldry." He felt that even though such
words were actually used in life and in literary works, they

"corrupted and debased" the national language as well as

morals. (Letters, 287)

Webster's intentions not only to rival Johnson but to
surpass him are revealed in his, as Friend qualifies it,

"pugnaciously assertive Preface." (Friend, 25)

With these extensive views on the '
subject, have I entered upon the
plan of compiling, for my fellow
citizens, a dictionary which shall
exhibit a far more correct state
of the language than any work of this
kind. In the mean time, this com-
pend is offered to the public, as
a convenient manual. No person
acquainted with the difficulties
attending such a compilation, will
flatter himself or the public, that
any thing like perfection is in the
compass of one man's abilities.
Nothing like this is here promised.
All that I have attempted, and all
that I can believe to be executed,
is a dictionary with considerable
improvements; a work required by
the advanced and advancing state of

Page 70
 science and arts. The dictionaries
of a living language must be revised
every half century, or must neces­
sarily be erroneous and imperfect.
(Preface, xxiii)

While his Compendious was "intended as a substitute for

Johnson's folio and quarto, with. . .valuable improvements11

(Warfel, 264), Webster's real substitute did not arrive until

his American Dictionary appeared in 1828.

Despite the 1806 dictionary's shortcomings, its compiler

was firm in his adherence to the principle that language

could not be fixed or refined. As Sledd and Kolb noted of

Webster's growing linguistic awareness by 1806, he knew that

"lexical change will follow cultural change, that in the

vocabulary of a language permanence is not always good and
change is not always bad." (198) Two ironies in relation to
Webster's language views are to be found in some of his own

definitions and in the eventual success his dictionaries

found among the American public. The first concerns the
moderate orthographic reforms introduced in the Compendious

which have been generally followed in American English to the

present day, thus fixing, and uniformly so, American

spelling. Webster had argued for "uniformity in the classes
of words [because it] is the most convenient principle in the
structure of language." (Preface, ix) This he ultimately
achieved in large part, but not without contributing to the

wide public sense of a dictionary’s authority in all aspects

of language.

Page 71
 The other irony concerns the political Influences of the
lexicographical biases of the compiler. Johnson's often-

cited excesses hardly diminish the well-formulated

definitions for which his 1755 dictionary is lauded. Neither
do his comparable definitions substantially detract from
Webster's Compendious. Yet one cannot overlook the subtle

sway an ostensibly detached definition like federalist ("a

friend to the Constitution in the U. States") can exert on
the unassuming reader, despite its relative accuracy. Thomas

Pyles notes persuasively in his Words and Ways of American

English that all lexicographers inevitably and unconsciously

blend their social and political proclivities into otherwise

objective definitions, albeit their meticulousness in trying

to avoid this. (Pyles, 117) The ideal of objectivity

remains elusive even in the most technologically equipped and

professionally staffed dictionary establishment when

definitional treatment concerns politically sensitive words.

All words idiolectally submit poorly to the demands of

objectivity— an ephemeral goal if there ever were one.
In 1828 Webster's two volume quarto An American

Dictionary of the English Language was published and soon was

acknowledged by many as "the most significant contribution to
the growth of English lexicography between Dr. Johnson and

the appearance of the first volume of the New England

Dictionary." (Krapp, I, 262-63) The value of the work has

been, naturally, variously appraised with regard to its

ramifications for later English dictionaries.

Page 72
 For his magnum opus, Webster only slightly adjusted the
conservative position of the Compendious. In the

"Introduction” and the "Advertisement" of the American

Dictionary, he bemoans the variety of inconsistency of
current spelling,
Such is the state of our written language,
that our own citizens never become masters
of orthography, without great difficulty and
labor; and a great part of them never learn
to spell words with correctness. In addition
to this, the present orthography of some
classes of words leads to a false pro­
nunciation.
In regard to the acquisition of our
language by foreigners, the evil of our
irregular orthography is extensive, beyond
what is generally known or conceived.
While the French and Italians have had the
wisdom and the policy to refine and improve
their respective languages, and render
them almost the common languages of all
well-bred people in Europe; the English
language, clothed in a barbarous ortho­
graphy, is never learned by a foreigner
but from necessity; and the most copious
language in Europe, embodying an uncommon
mass of science and erudition, is thus
very limited in its usefulness. (Vol. I, sig. E3V)

In the 1806 dictionary, Webster listed alternatives for

the spelling of words, such as accouter, crowd, leopard,

parishioner, soup, and zebra. Words of foreign descent are

not as boldly anglicized as before; final e is restored in

words like definite, doctrine, fugitive, etc.; and a more

consistent use of -lze is presented. (as cited in Friend,
55) Webster, at seventy years old when the American
Dictionary came out, was still the "cantankerous egotist"
(Hulbert, 29) but a man whose linguistic nationalism had

Page 73
cooled and whose ardor for orthographic regularization had
given way to a recognition of such a process as necessarily
being a gradual, continuing one.
That Webster saw as one of his tasks as lexicographer
the inaugurating of spelling reform lends credibility to his
belief in the weighty influence dictionaries held, not only
for the public conception of language but also for public
enlightenment in the world view of English (at least the

Websterian world view). In his Preface to the 1828

dictionary, he addressed this aim for regularization in

orthography and structure in tones that harked back to

earlier ideas for fixing the language.

If the language can be improved in

regularity, so as to be more easily
acquired by our own citizens, and by
foreigners, and thus rendered a more
useful instrument for the propagation
of science, arti civilization and
Christianity; if it can be rescued
from the mischievous influence of
sciolists and that dabbling spirit
of innovation which is perpetually
disturbing its settled usage and
filling it with anomalies, if, in
short, our vernacular language can be
redeemed from corruptions, and our
philology and literature from
degradation; it would be a source
of great satisfaction to me to be one
among the instruments of promoting
these valuable objects. If this object
cannot be effected, and my wishes and
hopes are frustrated, my labor will
be lost, and this work must sink
into oblivion. (Vol. I, sig. ASv)

The American Dictionary, though not a great commercial

success in its day, did manage to establish a certain

Page 74
authoritativeness in language matters both in America and
Britain. It replaced Johnson's dictionaries in American use

and was "widely used in England perhaps chiefly because of

the simplicity and clarity of the definitions and the

addition to the vocabulary of many words which were in usage

but had not previously been admitted by other lexico­

graphers." {Hulbert, 28) On these two counts, as he well
noted in the Preface that the dictionary's merit "must lie in
the copiousness of its vocabulary, and the accuracy and com-
Iv
prehensiveness of its definitions" (Vol. I, sig. A ),

Webster's American Dictionary secured a lasting place in

English vocabulary despite its many serious flaws.

Regarding copiousness of vocabulary, Webster Included

70,000 entries, compared to the 58,000 in the American

edition of Todd’s revision of Johnson and the 38,000 of the

original Johnson. Many of the additional words in Webster
are, not surprisingly, derived forms. Such derivations are

by and large easily comprehensible to average speakers of

English and their almost complete absence in Johnson is

probably attributable to this reason. (Friend, 37) Of those
entries not to be derived from other entries, Webster brought

to his corpus thousands of words emanating from the

scientific and technical worlds which were rapidly developing
in the industrial revolution of America and England. In the
"Advertisement" in the front matter, Webster justified these
inclusions by arguing that "accurate definition of these
terms, in accordance with the advanced state of science at

Page 75
the present day, is now rendered important to all classes of
readers, by the popular character given of late to the

sciences, and the frequent occurrence of scientific terms and

allusions in literary works."

Dean Trench in his On some Definitions in Our English
Dictionaries (1857) leveled harsh criticism on Webster's

American Dictionary, feeling that, among other things,

Webster was guilty of padding his work with terms outside
even the slightest lay usage. Trench lambasted the American
for entering terms such as zeolitiform, zinkiferous,

zumosimiter and the like, which properly were to be confined

to specialized dictionaries. (Trench, 57-59) Similar

criticisms sprouted anew on the publication of Webster1s
Third New International Dictionary over the tens of thousands

of words from the so-called international Scientific

Vocabulary.
Webster's definitional treatment, seen from the
historical perspective of 1828 and compared to that of other
dictionaries, fulfilled his prefatory promise of accuracy and

comprehensiveness. Ever mindful of his dictionary's

serviceability for the general user, Webster did not equate

the desideratum of inclusiveness with prolixity. While

conciseness is generally aimed for in brevity, he expanded a
definition's senses with those peculiar to America and with

those either newly accoutering a word or resulting from

sharper discrimination. For example, whereas Johnson had
entered laboratory simply and only as "a chymist's workroom,"

Page 76
Webster presented the term thus:
1. A house or place where operations and
experiments In chemistry, pharmacy,
pyrotechny, &c., are performed.
2. A place where arms are manufactured
or repaired, or fire-works prepared;
as the laboratory in Springfield, in
Massachusetts.
3. A place where work is performed, or
any thing is prepared for use. Hence
the stomach is called the grand
laboratory of the human body; the
liver, the laboratory of the bile.
(cited in Friend, 43)

While Webster improved on Johnson's work with

definitions of finer discrimination, his dependence on

Johnson is large nonetheless. Joseph W. Reed, in his

article, "Noah Webster’s Debt to Samuel Johnson,"

meticulously compared the "L" entries in both dictionaries

and found that "of all 4,505 definitions written by
Webster,. . .1,481 or about one third, were culled from
Johnson or show unmistakable signs of Johnson's influence."

(98) Reed further notes that "since about 30 percent of

Webster's words had not been treated by Johnson, the extent

of verbal similarity is remarkable." (98) Webster's use of

Johnson is understandable given Johnson's stature and the

lexicographical traditions that direct all dictionary

construction. As Sledd and Kolb point out, Webster's
"achievement would have been distinctly lessened" without the

"working base" Johnson had provided. (198)

Johnson made great use of illustrative quotations not
only to enhance and contextualize the entries, but frequently

Page 77
to suffice for the definition alone. Webster, on the other
hand, downplayed the extensive use of illustrative quotations
in his definitions. In the preface, he qualifies his
restricted use by remarking,

Most English words are so familiarly and

perfectly understood, and the sense of them
so little liable to be called in question,
that they may be safely left to rest on the
authority of the lexicographer, without
examples.

In general, I have illustrated the signi­

fications of words, and proved them to be
legitimate, by a short passage from some
respectable author, often abridged from the
whole passage cited by Johnson. In many
cases, I have given brief sentences of my
own; using the phrases or sentences in which
the word most frequently occurs, and often
presenting some important maxim or sentiment
in religion, morality, law or civil policy.
(Vol. I, sig. G )

Though Webster was extremely selective in his use of

verbal citations, by "introducing quotations from American
authors alongside of those from English literature, he con­
trived in large measure to justify the title of his work."

(Baugh, 428) Such use hardly derived from pure

lexicographical considerations, nor did his use of maxims or

religious sentiments. Patriotically Webster stressed also

American usage and American pronunciation. The former of

these two emphases commended his work to an American public

but the latter was drawn in what was by then an old-fashioned

and crude diacritical system.

Webster’s limited use of illustrative quotations,

coupled with his sadly deficient etymologies, lends an

Page 78
awkward sense of the diachronic development of word forms and
meanings. In this, Webster gave short shrift to his own
linguistic notion of the dynamic aspect to language. His
self-confidence and "contempt for any theory that

controverted his own blinded him to the significance of even

those discoveries with which he was familiar." (Landau,

Dictionaries, 61) Newer theories were certainly developing

at the time of his compiling the American Dictionary and
Webster, to the detriment of his work, ignored the progress
being made by German philologists in understanding linguistic
change. Ironically, as Charlton Laird notes, "[nothing] was
dearer to him than. . .the pursuit of etymologies, and in
nothing so much as in vast synopsis of 'language affinities,1

perhaps, did he repose his hope for the gratitude and

admiration of Posterity." (3)
The lasting fame of Webster however does not derive from
the 1828 work nor his own new edition of 1841. For its day,

An American Dictionary exerted considerable influence on

language matters, wielding a definite authority in spelling
(though the great popularity of his spelling books canonized

Webster's name in this area long before 1828). Webster's

work owes its enduring reputation to the 1864 revision edited

by Noah Porter with its major reformulation of etymologies

by C. A. F. Mahn and to the vigorous promotion by Webster's
publishers. In George P. Krapp's estimation, "if it were not

for elaborate revisions of Webster's work, revisions with

which he had nothing to do but which nevertheless did retain

Page 79
what was genuinely good in the dictionary of 1828, Webster's
name would probably now be unknown in the land.1' (Krapp, Vol.

I, p. 363)
Webster's name could very well have been supplemented in
lexicography by that of Joseph Worcester, an erstwhile

assistant to Webster, who had revised the 1828 American

Dictionary the following year. One year later Worcester
brought out his own Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory

Dictionary of the English Language (Boston, 1830). This 400-

page dictionary, notably without etymologies, presented a

more skillful treatment of pronunciation with variants of

troublesome words. To look at the years cited just above,

one can readily understand the ensuing rivalry between the

two men and the bitter charges and counter-charges between

their publishers. This continued through Webster's 1841

edition, Worcester's Universal and Critical Dictionary of the

English Language (1846), a revision of Webster's, the

Pictorial Quarto Unabridged (1859), Worcester's master work,

A Dictionary of the English Language in 1860 until the afore­

mentioned Webster-Mahn edition of 1864. This end date is
reaffirmed subtly in the title of Friend's frequently cited
study, The Development of American Lexicography, 1798-1864.

This celebrated "War of the Dictionaries," though

largely commercial in its promulgation, did focus the
public's attention linguistically on the notion of dictionary

authority. Hulbert captures this dispute succinctly,

"To conservative, cultivated people of the
time, Worcester's books seemed preferable

Page 80
 to Webster's because of their closer
approximation to British standards, their
use of what seemed a more refined type
of pronunciation, that of the educated
speakers of cities like Boston, in con­
trast to Webster's more rural pronunciations,
and their preference for established usage
in spelling.” (31-32)

Fortunately, this competition in American dictionaries

generated "a steady improvement in the quality of commercial
dictionaries offered to the steadily growing American nation

with its expanding public school system and its millions of

immigrants eager to master the language of their new

homeland.” (Friend, 88)

V. The new lexicographical philosophy as based on historical

and comparative linguists
This productive and creative situation in American
lexicography was not at all paralleled in Britain, that is to

say, not until the new directions given linguistic and

lexicographical pursuits in the discussions of the London

Philological Society in 1857. At the suggestion of Frederick

James Furnivall to Richard Chenevix Trench, the latter under­
took to write a paper for presentation to the Society "On
Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries.” This paper,

published shortly after its reading, expressed by implication

the principles that were to guide the compilation of the New
English Dictionary. Begun in 1859 under the chief editorship
of Herbert Coleridge, the envisioned dictionary was to

correct the seven ways in which Trench saw past dictionaries

as defective. They were:

Page 81
 1. the inconsistent method of listing
obsolete terms
2. the incomplete listing of families or
groups of words
3. the faulty use of illustrative quotations
to show diachronic lexical development
4. the faulty coverage of the early meanings
of words
5. the neglect of synonym discrimination
6. the inadequate treatment of illustrative
citations from English literature
7. the extensive superfluity of encyclopedic
matter

The Nj_ E!^ D., eventually to become the 0^_ (Oxford

English Dictionary), adopted these principles enunciated by

Trench, which can be broadly viewed as "a corrective to an
earlier tradition," and conceptually and practically, "they
mark a turning-point in the history of English dictionary-

making." (Osselton, "History," 21) The crux of the change

lies in the expression of a new philosophy of lexicography

emanating from the spirit of discovery in historical and

comparative linguistics. Trench encapsulated his conception

of a dictionary as "an inventory of the language." For this

compilation,
it is not the task of the maker. . .to
select the good words of the language.
If he fancies that it is so, and begins
to pick and choose, to leave this and
take that, he will quickly go astray.
The business which he has undertaken
is to collect and arrange all the
words, whether good or bad. . .which
those writing in the language have
employed. (Trench, 3-4)

Notably, Trench regarded the lexicographer as "an historian

of [the language], not a critic" (4) and the full title of
the eventual twelve-volume dictionary originally appeared as

Page 82
A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles.
The editors set out to sketch the biographies of the
words in English, showing when they first came into written
existence, how each of the meanings developed and with what
historical relation to the other senses of the meaning. To

make complete the analogy to human life, the dictionary would

cite for those words or meanings that have become obsolete

the date of the last written occurrence that could be found.

Spellings are displayed in separate blocks by centuries to

facilitate a clear recognition of orthographic development.

James A. H. Murray, the third editor of the massive

undertaking, (after eighteen years of slow progress under
Furnivall), writing in his Romanes Lecture of 1900 on the
evolution of English lexicography, gave the particulars of

the historical research on the O. E. D .:

. . .they are an induction of facts gathered
by the widest Investigation of the written
monuments of the language. For the purposes
of this historical illustration more than
five millions of extracts have been made,
by two thousand volunteer Readers, from
innumerable books, representing the English
literature of all ages, and from numerous
documentary records. . .(Evolution, 47)

While the prodigious task of minutely perusing all of

English literature was indeed carried out by this army of
volunteer readers, Murray himself edited nearly half of the
whole work before his death in 1915. By the time of the
dictionary's completion (the work was published in fascicles

from 1884 to 1928), it numbered 15,487 pages of three columns

of type. It includes more than 240,000 head words and, with

Page 83
subordinate words and combinations, numbers over 400,000
entries. More than 1.8 million citations from its file of 5

million were printed in the dictionary, (statistics cited

from Landau, Dictionaries, 69)

The oxford English Dictionary, providing as it does a

record of the historical development of the meaning of each
word and contextual quotations with the definition of each
sense of a word, presents a body of information still largely

unchallenged. It provides, as notes Landau, ''any contem­

porary lexicographer. . .[with] the solid base for all he

does." (71) Replete with authoritative etymologies that

were fuller and more detailed than in any other dictionary up
to that time, this strictly historical work was "permeated...
through and through with the scientific method of the
century." (Murray, Evolution, 49) The written word, thus

traced across centuries through printed material pored over

by thousands of readers and codified by staff members,
reached an apotheosis in this multi-volume testament. The
monumental achievement that it was, notwithstanding, the
Oxford English Dictionary in turn has codified the socio­
cultural practices of its compilers and contributing readers.
Lexicographical tradition, much longer in its develop­
ment in England than in America, was carried on by educated
generalists and on these the 0. E. D. depended. Hulbert

paints an idyllic picture of the gracious, cooperative

readers who gathered quotations for the O. E. D.:

Unpaid readers. . .[had] the leisure to
extract quotations for a work which

Page 84
 [would] not contribute to their fame
or prestige. . .In that quieter world
before the first World War there was
an educated leisure class, hundreds
of cultivated men, living on Inherited
wealth or the income from parishes
which did not require much exertion
from them, men who could appreciate
the significance of such a dictionary
as that planned and were glad to co­
operate in the preparation of it.
(Hulbert, 40)

Idyllic though this compilation might have been, it

helps to explain partially the overlooking of scientific and

technical vocabulary in the CK E^ D^ (This has been remedied

to a small extent with the Inclusion of the basic lexicon of

science and technology in the four-volume Supplement: A-G,

1972, H-N, 1976, O-Scz, 1982, Se-Z, 1986). Despite Trench's

philosophy of collecting and arranging all the words, whether
good or bad, in fact, sexual and scatological words were not
admitted. The Supplement started to pick them up in 1972.

Also rectified under the Supplement's editorship of Robert W.

Burchfield was the reporting of English as used in the U. S.,

Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Such omissions in the main

work of the Oxford English Dictionary tend to confirm the
generalist orientation of the British upper class.

Significantly, the language investigated was truly what

Trench called for, the language "which those writing in

(italics mine). . .have employed."

The influence of the E^ D^'s historical approach in

dictionary compilation was immediate and wide-ranging. In

American, the Century Company engaged the Sanskrit scholar

Page 85
and linguist William D. Whitney to edit what eventually
became the twelve-volume Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
(published 1889-1909). Modeled on the EL D^, the Century
enlarged drastically upon a growing practice in American
lexicography— the inclusion of much encyclopedic matter and
an atlas. The work was very successful, being reprinted 30
times by 1914. (Matthews, 3-4) It too drew from an enormous
citation file and brought to maturity the trend in American

dictionaries of accompanying definitions with pictorial

illustrations. The Century, for its day, offered a more com­

plete presentation of scientific, artistic and professional
terms than any other dictionary. Funk and Wagnall’s Standard

Dictionary (1893-94) similarly furnished a large number of

pictures, including color plates and this work became in the
early twentieth century, Merriam-Webster's chief competition.
Its publisher, Isaac Funk aimed for practicality in his
dictionary, and its minimal etymological treatment, along
with prescriptive usage notes led to its frequent adoption as

a standard of style in many printing houses and newspaper

offices.
One of the four IK editors, William A. Craigie saw

the need for an American work following more exactly the plan
of the 0^ E^ D^, that is, a dictionary of linguistic, not
extralinguistic, information. While the Dictionary of

American English on Historical Principles (Chicago, 1936-44)

was construed by Craigie and his co-editor James R. Hulbert
to supplement the information of the 0^ L ^ in all areas,

Page 86
the L by its very title sought especially to fill in
the wide gaps concerning Americanisms.

VI. contemporary lexicography's debt to structural

linguistics

The emerging science of structural linguistics as it

developed in America, only in the mid-twentieth century began
to exert an influence on the applied practice of lexico­

graphy. The time was at hand for an assault on the authori­

tarian notions that suffused dictionaries. Linguistically,
this assault was predicated upon the langue/parole dichotomy

enunciated by Ferdinand de Saussure in his cours de

Linguistique General (1901) and his greater insistence on the

synchronic view of language explication. Made quasi-

empirical in American structuralism by Leonard Bloomfield in

his Language (1933), the lexicographical implications of

these theories were first felt on collegiate dictionaries in

the 1940's.
These types of dictionary are not merely abridgements of
larger works but are ends in themselves, usually containing

from 130,000 to 160,000 entries. (Barnhart, "Lexicography,"

114) Commercially more successful than unabridged

dictionaries and sold widely in bookstores, these collegiate

dictionaries have come to reside in most American homes.

Ironically, with their greater affordability leading to their

wider disbursement, many of the most popular dictionaries,

though founded on so-called descriptivist linguistics

principles, were regarded by users in a traditional

Page 87
prescriptivist perspective. Bloomfield in his seminal
"secondary and Tertiary Responses to Language" describes the
irony of popular language notions being challenged by
empirical linguistic discoveries:
On other than a scientific level, our
culture maintains a loosely organized but
fairly uniform system of pronouncements
about language. Deviant speech forms in
dialects other than the standard dialect
are described as corruptions of the standard
forms ('mistakes,' 'bad grammar') or branded
as entirely out of bounds, on a par with
the solecisms of a foreign speaker ('not
English'). The forms of the standard
dialect are justified on grounds of
'logic.' Either on the strength of logical
consistency or in pursuance of largely
conventional authoritative rules,. . .
certain forms are theoretically prescribed
for the standard dialect. (45)

The structuralist camp, in another irony, concerned

itself largely with language aspects exclusive of the
semantic structure of lexical items, in acknowledgement of
the.Bloomfieldian dictum that "the lexicon is really an
appendix of the grammar, a list of basic irregularities."
(Bloomfield, Language, 274) Phonology, morphology and syntax

constituted its purview and this had its prime effect on

dictionaries in the area of pronunciation, wherein older

pronunciation keys were revised to reflect actual speech

instead of transcriptions of spellings. The emphasis lexi­

cographically fell more and more on spoken usage and not on

the written. As promulgated by Kenyon and Knott in the

preface to their Pronouncing Dictionary of American English

(1944):

Page 68
 . . .this is a dictionary of colloquial
English, of the everyday unconscious speech
of cultivated people— of these in every
community who carry on the affairs and
set the social and educational standards
of those communities. . .
On the other hand, the pronunciation
which the present editors intend to represent
in this book is what has been called "easy
English," "the speech of.well-bred ease"—
not slovenly or careless speech, nor, on
the other hand, formal platform speech.
(vii)

shifting more attention to informally spoken English as

the foundation of pronunciation, the collegiate dictionaries

also incorporated into their definitional plans the meanings

attaching to utterances beside the written phrases and words.

The first of these smaller-sized dictionaries, The American

College Dictionary, edited by Barnhart (1947) included a

small advisory committee of distinguished structural
linguists— Kemp Malone, Leonard Bloomfield, Charles C. Fries
among others. Barnhart noted in the introduction to this

dictionary its structuralist orientation:

This dictionary records the usage of the
speakers and writers of our language; no
dictionary founded on the methods of modern
scholarship can prescribe as to usage; it
can only inform on the basis of the facts
of usage. A good dictionary is a guide to
usage much as a good map tells you the
nature of the terrain over which you may
want to travel. It is not the function of
the dictionary-maker to tell you how to
speak, any more than it is the function of
the mapmaker to move rivers or rearrange
mountains or to fill in lakes. A dictionary
should tell you what is commonly accepted
usage and wherein different classes of
speakers or regions differ in their use
of the language, (vii)

Page 89
 The ACD made great use of illustrative quotations to
contextualize definitions, having acquired the rights to use
the citations of the OED, the DAE, and the Century. It also

availed itself of two lexicostatistical studies, A Semantic

Count of English Words by Edward L. Thorndike and Irving
Lorge (1938) and its supplementary The Semantic Count of the
570 Commonest English Words by Lorge (1949). These semantic
counts were keyed to the definitions of the OED and the

findings on the frequency and range of meanings were used by

the dictionary's definers as guides to both ordering the

definitions and assessing the proportions of space in

definitions according to their importance. (Barnhart, 116)
shortly after the ACD was marketed, Funk and Wagnall's

published in 1947 their New College Standard Dictionary.

Like its larger unabridged predecessor, the Standard

Dictionary, the CSD set a premium of thorough practicality.

This goal engendered simplication of its pronunciation key

and transcriptions, which were dropped in its one (1950) re­
edition. Among other reasons, the CSD failed its readership

by making its innovative system for marking pronunciation

seemingly too complex for each reference. With stressed
syllables underlined and only syllables of atypical English

appearance respelled, its streamlined result added to the

visual disadvantage of main entries in small caps, which left

the words presented in uncharacteristic shapes. (McMillan,

220) Just the same, by its number of main entries, separate

definitions, new words and meanings, up-to-date etymologies

Page 90
and its dropping of "slang" and "colloquial" usage labels in
favor of the simpler "popular," the CSD legitimately rivaled
the ACD in lexicographical acumen. In McMillan's comparative

study of five college dictionaries, he rated the ACD first

because its editors were more linguistically sophisticated
but ranked the CSD a close second above other 1940's works

like the MacMillans' Modern Dictionary (1947), Webster's

Collegiate Dictionary 5th ed., (1941), and The Winston
Dictionary (1946). (McMillan, 214-221)

In 1953, Webster1s New World Dictionary of the American

Language entered the college dictionary market. The WNWD of

the World Publishing Company, not of Merriam-Webster, catered

to the less educated with nontechnical language in all

definitions. The definitional treatment in the WNWD mirrored

the principles of defining worked out by Thorndike in his
school dictionaries of the early 40's. (Barnhart, 117) This

style of defining contrasts strongly with the traditional

style of using technical terminology to explain technical

terms, as exemplified in the Webster's Seventh New Collegiate

Dictionary (1963). The seventh Collegiate edited by Philip

Babcock Gove appeared two years after, and was based on

Webster1s Third New international Dictionary. Like its

parent, all definitions in the Seventh were listed in
historical order, yet it diverged in a small way by

simplifying its pronunciation transcriptions.

By the time of the Eighth Collegiate edition of
Webster's series (1973), the corpus had expanded to 150,000

Page 91
entries, an Increase of 20,000 words over the Seventh. Host

noteworthy about the Eighth Is the Inclusion of terms from

the scatological sphere In acknowledgement of the wider-

spreading usage of such taboo and vulgar terms In literary

contexts. (Barnhart, 121) Although this acknowlege Is of
predominantly spoken terms as they appeared In only written
citations, It Is at least one necessary for the adequate
recording of language. This latest departure from the old
prescriptive tradition of avoiding obscenity jarred harshly
with the common policy of collegiate dictionaries, as

enunciated by David Guralnik in the second edition of the

WNWD (1970):
The absence from this dictionary of a hand­
ful of old, well-known vulgate terms for
sexual and excretory organs and functions
is not due to a lack of citations for these
words from current literature. On the
contrary, the profusion of such citations
in recent years would suggest that the
terms in question are so well known as to
require no explanation. The decision to
eliminate them. . .was made on the
practical grounds that there is still
objection in many quarters to the
appearance of these terms in print and
that to risk keeping this dictionary out
of the hands of some students by intro­
ducing several terms that require little
if any elucidation would be unwise, (viii)

Landau calls the Webster1s Third New International

Dictionary of the English Language "the only truly unabridged

synchronic dictionary in English." (Dictionaries, 352)
R. L. Chapman concludes his review ("A Working Lexicographer
Appraises Webster1s Third New International Dictionary" ) by

Page 92
noting that it is, after all is said and done, "a marvelous
achievement, a monument of scholarship and accuracy." To be
sure, there is a host of negative reactions to the WNID3, as

well as of other positive ones and a representative sampling

of these critical receptions has been drawn together in James

Sledd and Wilma Ebbltt's Dictionaries and THAT Dictionary

(1962). THAT dictionary was the third edition of Merriam-

Webster’s unabridged international dictionaries, the first

dating back to 1909 and the second in 1934. The W1

put its lexicographical stamp on English with its massive
inclusion of scientific and technical terms, its great expan­

sion of the 1890 Webster1s International Dictionary and its

inclusion of encyclopedic appendices. The W2 appeared

with the largest lexicon in English and still retains that

distinction with 600,000 entries, a sum attained by its
extensive coverage of obsolete and rare terms.
The W3 appeared on the market in 1961 containing
150,000 fewer entries than the W2, but at the same time
with 100,000 new entries and meanings. Compiled partly from
a citation file of ten million slips drawn predominantly from
modern sources, this unabridged dictionary had established an

historical cut-off point at 1755 and consequently, most rare

or obsolete words in the Second from before this time were

dropped. The new entries reflected the changed face of

English by the 1950's and 60's, especially as inflated by the
myriad aspects of technological and scientific progress since

the first third of the century. Constrained by the

Page 93
ever-spiraling costs in such a colossal production, the
publishers sought to produce a more streamlined dictionary to

of£set the high expenses. Ultimately, the work appeared

substantially thinner in bulk, owing to the above-mentioned
word deletions, the excision of the gazeteer and the bio­
graphical names, a smaller type-face and more information
crowded onto any one page.
The Third, coming out as it did at the end of the

structural school's domination in linguistics, derived much

of its working philosophy from the structuralist orientation

to its own version of descriptivism and empiricism. This

late Merriam-Webster philosophy imbued the editorial

rationale with the scientifism of linguistic theory, though,

to be sure, as chapman noted in his review, "the relationship
between structural linguistics and commercial lexicography

is neither close nor clear. Most of the concerns of

linguistics impinge very little upon the work of the
dictionary-maker, which is above all an art of service."

(210)

The lexicographical innovations are several in the

W 3 , but not nearly the number that would substantiate
editor Gove's claim in the preface that it was "a completely
new work, redesigned, restyled, and reset." (6a) Barnhart in

his historical summary of lexicography in the mid 1900's

described the new dictionary as "a successful blend of
Webster's Second with new material, and, in some cases, the

Third is a restyling of the language of Webster's Second."

Page 94
He continues later by modestly undervaluing the work's claim
to newness. "The claim. . ., while of importance in

advertising, should not be considered of critical importance

in adictionary intended for all classes of people throughout
theworld who attempt to use the English language." ("Lexi­

cography," 101)
Gove sketches in the preface the objectives of the new
dictionary, stating that because of the ever-increasing

quantity of printed matter,

"not only are more words used more often. . .;
words must be used more economically and
more efficiently both in school and out. . .
Where formerly [people] had time to learn
by doing, they now need to begin by
reading and understanding what has been
recorded. . . This edition has been pre­
pared with the constant regard for the
needs of the high school and college
student, the technician, and the periodical
reader, as well as of the scholar and
professional." (6a)

These broad objectives, for the restricted purposes of this

study, can best be treated in examination of a couple of

implications they hold for the influence of the written

language of the dictionary on the layman's conception of

language.
The majority of the reviews and reactions to Webster's
Third contained in the aforementioned Sledd and Ebbitt's

compilation were not so much concerned with technical,

lexicographical matter as with what seemed to be the Third* s
attempt to retreat from authoritarian prescriptiveness.

Unsurprisingly, the writers of these reviews were mostly

Page 95
newspaper reporters and columnists and not lexicographers or
linguists. In this retreat they saw the setting of a

dangerous precedent. Landau in his "Egalitarian Spirit and

Attitudes Toward Usage" regarded the change or "the way
Webster's Third retreated, or failed to treat socially sensi­

tive words" as representing "a signal episode in the

evolution of the role of authority in English usage." He

continues, that "in a sense their accusations that Webster*s

Third had 'abdicated its authority' were true. Maybe it was

right to change its policy; maybe not. But change it was."

(5-6)
Notably, the Third largely avoided the usage labeling of

entries. Gove, in his preface, explains that— "accuracy in

addition to requiring freedom from error and conformity to
truth requires a dictionary state meanings in which words are

in fact used, not to give editorial opinion on what their

meanings should be." (6a) The dropping of the label

"colloquial" and the great curtailing of that of "slang,"
reminiscent of the 1947 CSD1s introduction of "popular" in

place of "slang" and "colloquial," received much criticism,

even from other lexicographers. Chapman felt that,

The rationale for this sparing use
of status labels is apparently grounded
on the fact that few linguistic forms
in isolation can be said to belong to a
specific level or style. . .

Where the level of usage is con­

cerned, the fact that a term which is
usually slang or informal may in rare
or imaginable instances be uttered in a
formal context should not prevent the
editor from applying a helpful label

Page 96
 if the majority of instances justify
itr. It is wiser to risk offending the
odd person who believes that a tiny
clutch of counterexamples wrecks a
label than to offend the natural word-
sense of [most people]. (208)

Other lexicographers and linguists deplored the Third1s

practice in labeling as an overadherence to descriptive
policy in the face of the stylistic guidance a dictionary
editor should offer to inexperienced students and non-native

speakers of English. In Wells' study of lexicographical

authority and usage, he found that while "the separation of

value statement from linguistic fact is fundamental to modern

descriptive techniques. . .the lexicographer cannot dismiss

the need for Sprachgefuhl. . .Finally, the actual influence
that a dictionary can exert on usage must be adjudged

minimal." (119)
In the Third's striving for definitional clarity, Gove

refers to the ''new dictionary style based upon completely

analytical one-phrase definitions. . . Since the headword is

intended to be modified only by structural elements

restrictive in some degree and essential to each other, the
use of commas either to separate or to group has been
severely limited." (6a) This one-phrase definition style,
applied consistently throughout the Third occasionally

becomes confusing because, as sledd comments,

"in English it is hard to keep track of
relations among a long series of pre­
positional phrases, participial phrases,
and relative clauses; the reader may
simply forget what goes with what, if
indeed he ever can find out." ("The

Page 97
 Lexicographer's Uneasy Chair," 684)

The new definitional style of the Third generally met

with approval from fellow lexicographers, albeit with some
minor reservations. To Chapman, when the policy of defining
in strict linear utterances "works, as it usually does, this

style gives the most lucid and satisfying definitions yet

written, and relieves the reader of the annoying necessity of

holding elements in suspension until completing elements are
set down." (206) The policy was followed .unrelentingly

throughout the W3 and, while occasionally some definitions

lack in lucidity, the uniformity raised the dictionary to a
new high in lexicographical objectivity, it left the work,
in the words of Patrick Kilburn," as little affected by
editorial whims and prejudice as is practically attainable."

("Ruckus in the Reference Room," 6)

Paradoxically, the W3, engaging in an internally
consistent and internally logical pattern of defining the

world, thereby challenges the primacy of the written word.

As the print medium had once organized the conceptual world

with space as the great symbol of order, the Third

reorganizes it by returning this world to the medium of fluid

sound. That sound is recorded in writing merely marks, as
Ong writes, a "concession to writing [which] must always be
made by the best-intentioned lexicographers." He continues

by claiming that
Webster's III represents one more
instance— a monumental one— of the
breakthrough to a more oral-aural

Page 98
 culture which marks our day, characterized
by the electronic media of communi­
cation, telephone, telegraph, radio,
television,. . .and the beep-beep of
orbiting spacecraft. The breakthrough
manifests itself in language study by
the development of linguists, of which
Webster III is a product and which
approaches language as basically an
aural-oral phenomenon, whereas tradi­
tional grammar had taken language
basically as written. . .(109)

With lexicography now passing through an electronic

adolescence in computer applications, the printed word’s

grasp on language becomes ever more tenuous. The dictionary
is returning in disguise to whence it came.

Page 99
 REFERENCES
Baker, Sheridan. "The Sociology of Dictionaries and the
Sociology of Words" in New Aspects of Lexicography,
Howard Weinbrot, ed. (1972) Carbondale, 111.: Southern
Illinois Univ. Press, 138-151.

Barnhart, clarence L. "American Lexicography, 1945-1973,"

American Speech, 53 (1978), 83-140.
______ ________ . "What Makes a Dictionary Authoritative" in
Theory and Method in Lexicography, Ladislav Zgusta, ed.
(1980) Columbia, S.C.: Hornbeam Press, 33-42.
Basker, James G. "The Irony of influence: the Example of
Johnson's Dictionary" (typescript of article presented
to the Lexicography Discussion Group of the Modern
Language Association Conference, 1985), 1.
Baugh, Albert c. (1957) A History of the English Language,
2nd ed. New York: Prentice Hall.

Bloomfield, Leonard. (1933) Language. New York: Holt,

Rinehart, Winston.
________________ . "Secondary and Tertiary Responses to
Language," Language. 30 (1944), 45-55.
Chapman, Robert L. "A Working Lexicographer Appraises
Webster's Third New International Dictionary," American
Speech, 42 (1967) 202-16.
Dykema, Karl. "Cultural Lag and Reviewers of Webster III,"
AAUP Bulletin, 49 (1963), 364-369.
Emsley, Bert. "Progress in Pronouncing Dictionaries,"
American speech, 15 (1940) 55-59.
Friend, Joseph H. (1967) The Development of American
Lexicography, 1798-1864. The Hague: Mouton.
Guralnik, David B. "The Beginnings of English Dictionaries"
in Webster* s New World Dictionary of the American
Language. [i960) Cleveland: Collins, xi.
Hartmann, R. R. K . , ed. (1979) Dictionaries and Their Users.
Exeter: Exeter University Press.
_______________ , ed. (1983) Lexicography: Principles and
Practice. London: Academic Press.
Householder, Fred W., and Sol Saporta, eds. (1962) Problems
in Lexicography. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University
Press.

Page 100
Hulbert, James Root. (1968) Dictionariesi British and
American. London: Andre Deutsch.

Johnson, Samuel. "The Plan o£ a Dictionary of the English

Language" in Johnson: Prose and Poetry. Mona Wilson,
ed. (1957) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univers1ty Press.

Joseph, John Earl. "Dictionaries and the Standard," (type­

script of article presented to the Lexicography Discus­
sion Group of the Modern Language Association
Conference, 1985), 7.
Kilburn, Patrick, "Ruckus in the Reference Room," Union
College Symposium, 3-9. Rpt. in Sledd and Ebbltt,
(1962) 206-19.

Krapp, George Philip. (1960) The English Language in

America, 2 vols. New York: Ungar. Rpt. of 1955.

Laird, Charlton. "Etymology, Anglo-Saxon, and Noah Webster,"

American Speech, 21 (1946), 3-15.

Landau, Sidney I. (1984) Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of

Lexicography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

________________ . "The Egalitarian Spirit and Attitudes

Toward Usage," American Speech, 54 (1971), 3-11.

Long, Percy Waldron. "English Dictionaries Before Webster,"

Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, IV
(1909) .
Lorge, Irving. (1949) The Semantic Count of the 570
Commonest English Words. New York: Institute of
Psychological Research.
Luschnig, C. A. E. (1982) Etyma. New York: University
Press of America.
Mathews, Mitfod M. (1958) Words: How to Know Them. New
York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston.
McDavid, Raven I., Jr., and Audrey R. Duckert, eds. (1973)
Lexicography in English. Annals of the New York Academy
of Sciences, vol. 211. New York: New York Academy of
Sciences.
McMillan, James B. "Five College Dictionaries," college
English, 10 (Jan. 1949) 214-221.
Murray, James A. H. (1900) Evolution of English Lexico­
graphy . Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rpt. by McGrath
Publishing (College Park, Maryland, 1970).

Page 101
Noyes, Gertrude E. "Critical Reception o£ Johnson's
Dictionary in the Latter Eighteenth Century," Modern
Philology, 52 (1955), 175-91.
_______ . "The First English Dictionary, Cawdrey's
Table Alphabeticall," Modern Language Notes, 58 (1943),
600-05.

Ong, Walter J., S. J. "Hostility, Literacy and Webster III,"

College English, 26 (1964), 106-111.
Osselton, N. E. "John Kersey and the ordinary words of
English," English Studies, 60 (1979), 555-61.
___________ _____. "On the history of dictionaries" in Lexi-
cographyT Principles and Practice. R. R. K. Hartmann,
ed7 (1983) London: Academic Press, 13-21.
Pyles, Thomas. (1952) Words and Ways of American English.
New York: Random House.
Read, Allen Walker. "Projected English Dictionaries, 1755-
1828," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 36
(1937), 188-205 and 347-59.
Reed, Joseph w. "Noah Webster's Debt to Samuel Johnson,"
American speech, 37 (1962), 95-105.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. (1959) Cours de Linguistlque
Generale. Trans, by wade Baskin. New York: The
Philosophical Library.

Sheldon, Esther K. "Walker's Influences on the Pronunciation

of English," PMLA, 62 (1947), 130-46.
Sledd, James. "The Lexicographer's Uneasy Chair," College
English, 23 (1962), 682-87.
Sledd, James and Wilma R. Ebbitt. (1962) Dictionaries and
THAT Dictionary. Chicago: Scott, Foresman.
Sledd, James and Gwin Kolb. (1955) Dr. Johnson's Dictionary.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Starnes, Dewitt T., and Gertrude E. Noyes. (1946) The
English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, 1664-1755.
Chapel Hill, N.C.: University oTT”North Carolina Press.

Thorndike, Edward L. and Irving Lorge. (1938) A Semantic

Count of English Words. New York: Teachers College,
Columbia Univ.

Page 102
Trench, Richard Chenevix. (1857) On Some Deficiencies in Our
English Dictionaries. London: London Philological-
Society.
Warfel, Harry R., ed. (1953) Letters of Noah Webster. New
York.
Webster, Noah. (1951) Dissertations on the English Language.
Ed. by Harry WarfeTI GainesvilTi, Fla.: scholars
Facsimiles and Reprints.
Weekly, Ernest. "On Dictionaries," Atlantic Monthly,
(June, 1924) 782-91. Rpt. in Sledd and Ebbitt, 9-21.
Weinbrot, Howard D., ed. (1972) New Aspects of Lexicography.
Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press.
Wells, Ronald A. (1973) Dictionaries and the Authoritarian
Tradition. The Hague: Mouton.

Whitehall, Harold. "The Development of the English

Dictionary" in Essays on Language and Usage, 2nd ed.
Leonard F. Dean and Kenneth G. Wilson, eds. (1963) New
York: Oxford University Press.
Zgusta, Ladislav. (1971) Manual of Lexicography. The Hague:
Mouton.
Zgusta, Ladislav, ed. (1980) Theory and Method in
Lexicography. Columbia, S.C.: Hornbeam Press.

Page 103
 DICTIONARIES CITED
1588, Dictlonarium Linguae Latinae et Anqlicanae, Thomas
Thomas.

1604, A Table Alphabetical!, Robert Cawdrey.

1616, An English Expositor, John Bullokar.

1623, The English Dictionarie, Henry Cockeram.
1656, Glossographia, Thomas Blount.

1658, The New world of English words, Edward Phillips.

1676, An English Dictionary, Elisha Coles.

1702, A New English Dictionary, John Kersey.

1708, The New World of Words, revised ed. by John Kersey of
pmiipi.-----------------
17 21, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, Nathan
Bailey.

1730, Dictlonarium Britannicum, Nathan Bailey and Joseph

Nicol Scott.

1749, Lingua Britannica Reformats, Benjamin Martin

1755, A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson.
AErldged in JoEnson's Dictionary, A Modern Selection.
E. L. McAdam, Jr. and George Milne (New York: Modern
Library, 1963).

1764, A New Spelling Dictionary, John Entick.

1773, A New Dictionary of English Language, William Kenrlck.
1780, A General Dictionary of the English Language, Thomas
sEeridan.

1791, Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the

English~Language, John Walker.
1806, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language,
Noah Webster.
1828, An American Dictionary of the English Language, Noah
WeEster.

1830, Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of

the E. L., Joseph Worcester.

Page 104
Dictionaries Cited (continued)
1846, Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English
Language, Joseph Worcester.

1860, A Dictionary off the English Language, Joseph Worcester.

1882-1928, A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles
(now, The Oxford English Dictionary, James A. H. Murray,
Henry Bradley, W. A. craigie and C, T. onions. (Oxford:
The Clarendon Press). Also, A Supplement to the O.B.D.,
R. W. Burchfield. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
(in progress).

1889-1910, The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, William D.

Whitney. (New YorTT: Century).
1893-1894, A Standard Dictionary of the English Language,
Isaac Funk. (New York: Funlt-and Wagnalls).

1934, Webster New International Dictionary of the English

Language, 2nd ed., William Allan Neilson and Thomas A.
Knott. (Springfield: Merriam-Webster).

1938-1944 r A Dictionary of American English on Historical

Principles, William A. Craigie ana James Hulbert.
(ChicagoT Univ. of Chicago Press).
1944, A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English, John S.
Kenyon and Thomas A. Knott. (Springfield, Mass.:
Merriam-Webster).
1951, A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles,
Mitford Mathews. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press).

1961, Webster1s Third New International Dictionary of the

English Language. Philip B. Gove. (SprlngfielcT7 Mass.:
Merriam-Webster).

Page 105
 COLLEGIATE DICTIONARIES

1947, The American College Dictionary, Clarence L. Barnhart.

(New York: Random House).
1947, Standard College Dictionary, Isaac Funk. (New York:
Funk and Wagnalls).
1953, Webster's New World Dictionary of the American
Language, David B. Guralnik and Joseph H. Friend. (New
York: World). Seconded., 1970, Guralnik. (Cleveland;
Collins).
1963, Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, Philip B.
Gove. [Springfield: Merriam-Webster). Eighth ed.,
1973. Ninth ed., 1983, Frederick Mish.

Page 106
Chapter Three: The Lexicographical Metalanguage and User's
Lexicographical Literacy

I. Background
Socioculturally, the written language has come to over­
shadow the spoken in the West. It has become superior in the

popular mind to its oral counterpart. This has been so

because of a functional difference between orality and
literacy. Literacy changes one's outlook on language and

entails a shift in one's cognitive processes. As various

values have been affixed to speech registers, with broad

interpretations explaining the codes, similar mappings for
the variety of codes in the written language have gained much
scholarly attention in the past quarter century. Likewise
have the respective literacies of various readers received
much sociolinguistic and philosophical study in the present

post-structuralist era.
Rarely, though, has an examination of the text of the
dictionary and the user's lexicographical literacy been
undertaken to get at the nature of a popular conception of

language or to underscore the existence of dictionary writing

as an instrument of social control. This oversight largely
stems from the dictionary's often unacknowledged textuality

and its use as a source book for other more conventional •

linguistic analyses— phonological, morphological, semantic

and syntactic. Not to be disregarded either is the

dictionary's function of effecting more domination by the

Page 107
rich and powerful In Western society in maintaining and
extending control of the accumulation, storage and
dissemination of knowledge at the expense of the powerless.
To treat the dictionary (that is, the reading of it or
the use of it) as a literate practice will lay open the
nature of its writers’ codifications and its general users'

reception and processing of the standardized language. The

constraints and visual arrangement of the dictionary meta­
language work to objectify and atomize language, thereby
neutralizing it. This not only alters an Individual's
internal representation of language, but helps recast his

written language in form, content and style to conform to a

domesticated, depoliticized version of language. The

normative effect of this very conscious verbal manipulation

has created the possibility for the higher class to control

the much vaster lower class.

II. Social Elevation and Authority of the Dictionary

For the lay user, the English dictionary has attained
the social elevation of official keeper of the language. It
has captured the prestige that attaches to enviable users of

the language. That prestige is lent by others who seek to

imitate those users. Inevitably this prestige translates
into a certain authoritativeness of reputation and the
dictionary incorporates this implicitly in its text. As an

officialized guidebook or style sheet in commerce, law or

academia, it fills a social need in standardizing the written

Page 108
form of the language. It significantly, standardizes the

ideology about language, not its practice. As such, the

dictionary works to establish a linguistic, authoritarian
status quo for all users of the language. Be it by elevating

certain spellings or pronunciations to unmarked level, or

more importantly, be it by composing and ordering defini­

tions, the dictionary subtly sets the tone of language

description to conform to the practices of the politically

and bureaucratically powerful. This hardly makes the lexical

investigation an autonomous enterprise, yet realistically,

while this strategy is not intentional on the part of all

lexicographers, it is implicitly so by virtue of the user's

acquiescence to the management of his language system by a

restricted cadre of prestigious writers. Thus, the recent
lexicographical endeavors of modern structural or autonomous

linguistics have been directed along a scientific path

because, as Newmeyer notes,

"clearly, autonomous linguistics has been
able to offer a set of solutions to complex
linguistic problems. . . But one can hardly
expect, particularly in the human sciences,
that .a 'correct' approach (whatever that
might mean in fact) will necessarily be ac­
cepted. indeed, the success of autonomous
linguistics results to a considerable
degree from the fact that powerful institu­
tions have found it expedient to support
it." (13)

As this linguistics provides a methodology and mechanics

a bit different from the actual needs and practice of

lexicography, the ultimate dictionary products do run askew
of the idealized goals of pure, abstract linguistics. For

Page 109
the lexicographer, however, there is, as Gove writes, an
"obligation to act as a faithful recorder and interpreter of
usage" and if the dictionary should neglect this, "it cannot
expect to be any longer appealed to as an authority." (1967,

7) He thus sees the goal of lexicography as establishing a

standard, while attempting to record usage for
descriptivism's sake. Urdang succinctly says of valid
definitions and a dictionary's authority, "What is

•authorized' is what the lexicographer, in his limited

wisdom, considers so." (1986, personal communication)

Gove also notes in his above-mentioned article that

while lexicography is not yet and may never be a science, "it

is an intricate. . . and sometimes overpowering art,
requiring subjective analysis, arbitrary decisions, and
intuitive reasoning. It often uses analogy, precedent, and
probability, and it constantly has to distinguish between the

typical and atypical on the basis of knowledge and

experience." (7) This knowledge and this experience are
largely the lexicographer's and the linguistic descriptivism
is inadvertantly biased and colored with artificial notions
of correctness. This does not affect its purpose, though.
Lexicographical treatments should be viewed primarily as

descriptions of the language system and structure, and

secondarily as descriptions of actual performance. Indeed,

while initially we assume that the examples are just perfor­

mance tokens, the inclusion of any token in a dictionary may
be deemed as a modification of the language system. The very

Page 110
dictionary entry representing a standard of language will

result in the power to change language and the recognition of

that power by its users.

The dictionary handles the evidence of language by the

methods of "objective description," generalization and
constant revision. The frequently noted difference, though,

between descriptivism and prescriptivism, while simplistic

and serving of easily structured categorizations for
linguistic discussion, lends to an artificial and superficial

appreciation of the social realities of language use. The

dictionary has long contributed to this setting of boundaries
between the two concepts since the advent of structuralist

theory.
The model of lexicographical communication requires not

only some understanding of the lexicographer’s intentions and

his professional practices, it requires an understanding of
the values that the readers attach to the entries themselves.
By the sociolinguistic power of standardization and that of

the formal institutional code of the written language,

there come to be two levels to lexicographical communication

in general. The first is that of the abstractly descriptive,

lexicographical metalanguage used by the dictionary writers

and the second, that of the imitable code of word usage, form

and meaning as interpreted by the dictionary readers.

III. Descriptive Lexicographical Metalanguage

The dictionary is a catalogue of words, arranged alpha­
betically by their first letters and described by a series of

Page 111
paraphrases. The formal structure of the dictionary is made

of entries containing in their phrases the whole of the

essential information elucidating the word. The word, other­
wise known lexicographically as the lexeme ("the distillation

of the word from which all non-essential features have been

eliminated" - Hartmann: 1983, 7), is the subject of

predicates in the lexicographical metalanguage. The lexeme

commands the string of information in the entry and is, in

itself, its own predicate with regard to its orthography.

(Dubois, 39)
The predicates communicate the transcription of the

lexeme's pronunciation, its grammatical categorization in

discourse, its etymology and, the main subtheme of this

study, its definition. It is composed of a series of

synonymous paraphrases, each constituting more or less an

individual sense. The definition marks the only truly

appropriate material that can be submitted to an investi­

gation of lexicographical writing. As such, only

definitions, w i t h tV.eir occasional usage labels and

illustrative citations will be addressed. All other overt

orthographic, phonetic, syntactic and etymologic information

will be disregarded.
Lexicographical definitions traditionally are formulated
in an Aristotelian analysis of the word, that is, being

identified by genus and differentiae. A host of other

principles inhere in the composition of definitions, many of
which do not pertain logically to philosophical or linguistic

Page 112
concerns. Landau quite rightly notes that "lexicography is a
craft,. . . not a theoretical exercise to Increase the sum of
human knowledge. [It is] practical work to put together a

book that people can understand. (1984, 121) Me further

writes that
Every lexicographer, like any good author,
has his readers very much in mind. Whereas
philosophers are concerned with the internal
coherence of their system of definition,
lexicographers are concerned with explaining
something their readers will understand. The
methods each uses to achieve his goals only
incidentally coincide. (1984, 121)

The lexicographer's code of principles for defining has

been enumerated by many writers and particular ones are set

down in a style sheet for almost every dictionary for actual
observance by its working definers. Zgusta notes the fol­

lowing ideals;
1) "The lexicographic definition should consist
exclusively of words which are explained in
the dictionary."
2) The lexicographic definition should not con­
tain words more difficult to understand than the
explained word itself."
3) The defined word may not be used in its defini­
tion, nor any derivations or combinations unless
they are separately defined.

4) The definition must correspond to the part of

speech of the word defined. (257-258)

These ideals of definition of course must be and

occasionally are compromised in actual practice for the sake
of space-spacing. This most frequently arises in cases where
repetition of a derivative of an entry is made to avoid too

Page 113
many words In the definition. Just the same, most
definitions are treated analytically, meaning to say that the
semantic analysis of lexicographers is first contrastive

whereby lexical items are arranged criterially across a

spectrum of semantic features. Areas of contrast show up and
the lexicographer pares down the differentiae that will

disambiguate the genus word. The analysis continues of the

features a lexeme shares with others of its class and those

in which it is unique. This gives one or more differentiae

to include in the definition. Yet this methodology is none­

theless the expression of a normative point of view, a matrix

approach to distinguishing semantic features of different

lexical items. While the dictionary may treat a lexeme by

points of shape, smell, taste and color, a user's

appreciation of the word might entail aspects of function in
society that are not mentioned in the definition.
The organization of senses works according to either of

two methodologies: one, descriptive which stresses more

heavily the more common or frequent senses of the word and
two, explicative which traces the lines of derivation between

diverse senses and which is largely Inseparable from the

historical development of the lexeme. (Quemada, 487) Which­
ever of these methodologies is undertaken, the synonymous

paraphrase is often accompanied by synonyms or quasi-synonyms

of the lexeme or by negative synonyms.

The order of meanings of a polysemous word generally

follows either a semantic or historical arrangement. The

Page 114
semantic ordering is multifarious in actual application and
the historical, for lack of data, cannot be uniformly

applied. With a variability of applications possible,

Ianucci sees "the determining factors being for whom the

dictionary is intended and for what use or uses." (1962, 204
in Householder and saporta, and see also in this book,
Gedney: 229-234) Conclusively Zgusta notes that "in reality,

there is no single principle by the exclusive application of

which all polysemous entries of a dictionary could be

arranged as to the sequence of the single senses.” (1971,

275) Practicality here makes this fairly obvious, for as

Urdang says, "Documentation is seldom sufficient to enable

the lexicographer to make more than an educated guess as to
priority." (1963, 587) while various ordering arrangements
have been attempted by different lexicographers to map

different languages according to a universal design, as

Zgusta continues in his Manual of Lexicography, "there is no

single logical or epistemological system which would be both

powerful and detailed enough to be used unequivocally and
alone as the basis for the ordering of the senses and which
would command a general authority and recognition." (1971,

276)
For English lexicography, the polysemous word, if it has
a dominant sense, generally is arranged with that sense first

defined. Lacking such a dominant sense, a word unfolds

definitionally from that sense which has the broadest appli­
cation in most contexts. Technical and specialized senses,

page 115
along with regional, obsolete, or vulgar ones follow in what

would appear optimally appropriate for the lexicographer.

The sequencing of senses commonly proceeds from generalized
or unmarked senses to those more narrow or specific. Yet

this does not mean to suggest that any one of the senses
necessarily derives semantically or historically from the

immediately preceding sense in the definition sequence. For

words with multiple senses, the most clear and least
ambiguous mapping will inevitably run together slightly
disparate senses as they are ordered according to semantic or

logical clusters.
Consider the ordering of the single senses of the

polysemous queue:
OED: 1) Heraldry. The tail of a beast. 1592
2) Pigtail. 1748
3) A line of persons. 1837
4) A support of the butt of a lance. 1855
5) (a) The tail-piece of a violin or other instru­
ment (no year given)
(b) The tail of a note. 1876

W3: 1) Pigtail.
2) Line of persons.
3) A metal piece attached to the side of the
breast-plate of a suit or armor and used as a
rest for the butt of a lance.
4) The tailpiece of a violin or another stringed
instrument.
5) The tail of a musical note.

The OED and W3 ordering of senses are strictly

historical, whereas the RHP sample is semantically ordered by
frequency use. The RHP entry is much thinner largely due to

its ahistorical, popular orientation. Notice the similar

frequency design of the collegiate dictionaries (the samples

Page 116
here below), notable because of their wider range of lay

consultation.

RHP: 1) a braid of hair worn hanging down behind.

2) a file or line, esp. of people waiting their
turn.
v.t. 3) to form in line while waiting,
v.i.
WNWP2: 1) a plait of hair worn hanging from the back of
the head; pigtail.
2) [Chiefly Brit.] a line or file of persons,
vehicles, etc., waiting as to be served,
v.i. 3) to form in a line or file while waiting to be
served.

RHD-CE: Same as RHP.

Reference to the college dictionaries has been drawn

here in acknowledgement of their deep influence not only on

collegians, but on the lay population as a whole. As

lexicographer Kenneth G. Wilson clearly details of this

influence, "They record what's going on in the vocabulary
more promptly than do other general dictionaries. They pick

up new or variant spellings, pronunciations, meanings,

combined forms, and usage judgements. And because their new
printings appear so frequently, they can almost always note

such changes earlier and more sensitively than can the

unabridged dictionaries. . . They have three main virtues:
they're inexpensive, they're portable, and above all, they're

current." (Van Winkle*s Return, 18)

Since nearly all lexical units are polysemous, the task
of sufficient definition for the lexicographer is one of his
thorniest. The range and depth of the selection of details
for the various senses typically correlate with that of the

Page 117
entry selection for the dictionary as a whole. The size and

intended audience of the dictionary determines the scope of

coverage. A frequent danger for the lexicographer lies in
the mistaken assumption of polysemy where, in fact, different
applications of a lexical unit do not constitute different
senses; people rather think of polysemous meanings as
contextual and normative.
Polysemantic defining, taking to an extreme, would

indicate every nuance in a lexical unit’s meaning. While

Shcherba maintains this goal (1940, 101) and it would be

justifiable in a big dictionary geared to helping the user

understand difficult texts, the proliferation of senses

documented by dictionaries are, in most cases, metaphoric
extensions of the core meanings, inasmuch as language is, at
bottom, metaphoric and any new context in which any given

word is used implies a shift, however infinitesmal, from the

exact sense in which it was previously applied, too extensive

a polysemantic treatment lends to a user’s deflated awareness
of language's metaphoricity and to his enhanced feeling for
the autonomy of a word's meaning in the light of too many
closely related meanings. Any word is mutable in meaning as

its applications change. Take, for example, the noun and

often attributive adjective, "killer” in the W3.

killer 1: one that kills: a: MURDERER; esp.: a

homicidal criminal or maniac b: SLAUGHTERER; also:
one who buys animals for slaughter </*^ s took a big
share of the choice of low prime yearlings— Chicago
Daily Drovers Jour.> c: an effective bait in fishing
d: something that has a forceful and usu. violent
impact <a backhand stroke that was a ++* > <his
punch was a > e: slang: one who gives an

Page 118
 admirable or irresistible personal or sartorial
impression <she was no on looks— Garson Kanin>
2: an animal to be killed for food or other use
3: or killer whale : a fierce carnivorous gregarious
whale (Orcinus orca syn. Orca orca) 20 to 30 feet
long that is b l a c kwith yellowish white areas on
sides and underparts, has a high dorsal fin, power­
ful tail, and sharp strong teeth, and preys on large
fishes, seals, and even in groups on the larger
whales 4: a postal canceling stamp; also; a can­
cellation mark on a postage stamp

In this multi-sensed entry, the general subsenses under

1 and the following numbered senses reflect the widening

circle of metaphoric meanings emanating from the core

referential meaning. While it is undoubtedly the passage of

time which can explain the absence of other different

figurative senses, like that pertaining to a vigorously
laughable joke, it is quite conceivable that at the time of

publication, just as many unclted different senses existed.

More than conceivable, it is almost certain. It is only
natural to presume that this word gained, if only marginally

and very subtly, new extended meanings. This happens with

almost every word and brings further sustenance to Bakhtin's

notion of new meaning being ever produced or given greater or

lesser prestige value by any new usage and Interpreted as

such by any reader. Metaphoricity and literality are
controlled dialogically by both writer and reader. These
values behind words are more important than their content.

Different senses are distinguished in the metalanguage

by numbers, periods and perhaps restrictive labels. The

paraphrastic phrases are all predications of a subject, with

Page 119
an implicit copula. The predicates are verbal syntagms:

lexeme x is p (p being a synonymous paraphrase of x)

The artificial code or metalanguage is defined by its lexi­

con, its abbreviatory symbols, its typographical and

conventional characters and its diacritical signs. Of late,
there has been an effort to bring together a metalexico-
graphical lexicon to serve working dictionary writers. The
lexicon conforms to a strict neutrality in an artificial
language. It is constructed of certain words (understandable

for almost all readers) with one particular, definite sense,

much the same as the earliest Latin-English dictionaries

worked with English to define Latin words. (See also Imbs,

53)
While striving for clarity in definitions, the

dictionary editors try to make the writing not only accurate

but as readable as possible. Metalinguistic terminology can
only go so far in insuring clearness and consequently, the
working definitional vocabulary in a general monolingual

dictionary for native speakers cannot be constrained

according to a restricted code of verbal operators and
operations. In his preface to the Webster1s Third, Gove

notes that
the terminology of many subjects contains
words that can be adequately and clearly
explained only to those who have passed
through preliminary stages of initiation,
just as a knowledge of algebra is pre­
requisite for trigonometry. A dictionary
demands of its user much understanding
and no one person can understand all of

Page 120
 it. Therefore there is no limit to the
possibilities for clarification. Some­
what paradoxically a user of the dictionary
benefits in proportion to his effort and
knowledge, and his contribution is an
essential part of the process of under­
standing even though it may involve a
willingness to look up a few additional
words. (1961, 6a)
Theoretically then, the definitional vocabulary can be as
vast as the language's oral and written lexicon. Practically
though, by virtue of its metalanguage, the strictness of the

lexicographer's adherence to it, and the repetitiveness of

the use of particular generic words from the general lexicon,
the dictionary works with an elaborate restricted network of

predictable content and grammatical formulae.

In the definitions, part of the metalinguistic lexicon
is formed of terms like "the act of," "the state or quality
of," "one who," "any of the species of," or "in the manner
of" — sets of terms marking various parts of speech and to
be translated by the reader univocally. The metalinguistic

word "quality," for example, doesn't have the different

connotations of the word "quality" in the spoken language —
it encapsulates the derivation of a noun from an adjective

("uniformity is the quality of being uniform"). Here is the

conventionality of the metalanguage.

To this conventionality and explicitness, the meta­

language functions workably by being formulated in such a way

that the symbols and the operations of the predicate are

confined to an economical number of formulae. Each follows

the other linearly and always in the same order. Passing from

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1) "the lexeme Is x," 2) "lexeme x is y when articulated,"
follows the formulae set for the framework for the whole
article. It concludes with n) "lexeme x is x in the
1 2 3 n
phrases S ( x ),s(x ),s(x ). . . S ( x )" — this latter
formula concerns illustrations. This formulaic procedure,

consistently applied, produces both an impersonalness of

address— a mechanicalness, so to speak, and an overriding
logicalness that is underscored by a redundancy of certain
information. "In short," as Twaddell writes, "consistency of

procedures in both substance and technique forbids shifts in

handling [the lexicographer's] entries from case to case. He

cannot be ingenious in defining a word if that ingenuity,

applied to scores of other words, would be clumsy or

misleading. He cannot choose to define one sub-class by
synonyms only, and another class wholly without synonyms."

(219) Effectively, the metalanguage was developed to

maintain the lexicographer and not so much the reader who

doesn't typically compare definitions from one word to the

next.
This is to say that the nature of the definition (the

synonymous predicate syntagm) and the grammatical

categorization are tightly correlated with redundant terms.

More plainly, a noun can only be defined by a nominally - or

pronominally - headed definition, as in, "ALIEN: 1. one born

in or belonging to another country who has not acquired

citizenship by naturalization." By extension, a verb can

only be headed by another verb, that is, infinitive, either

Page 122
respectively transitive or intransitive, as in : "TERRIFY:
1. to fill with terror; make greatly afraid" and an adjective
by an adjectivalized present or past participle, another
adjective or combination of adverb, prepositional phrase or
adjective: "KINETIC: 1. pertaining to motion."

Such built-in redundancy works to set the reader in the

logical direction for both clarifying the ensuing predicate
and insuring a grammatical consistency to the predicate's
paraphrastic synonymy with the lexeme. A dictionary's logic
is internal--it is not a logic similar to that of rhetoric or

formal composition. It is functional and appropriate only

for the most part to dictionaries— a definer would imperil

his definitions by cleaving to the logic of the rhetorician

and a writer would likewise write tediously and repetitiously

in setting his sights by the lexicographical metalanguage.

The code of definition writing follows the guidelines of

accuracy, economy and clarity, but each of the three

principles is frequently embodied in a type of writing which
would contradict or entrammel one of the others in non-

lexicographical prose. Consider the often advisable need for

avoidance of repetition in expository writing which reads in

one handbook of composition,

"We cannot define a word by repeating the
word itself in the definition. If we de­
fine the word statistician by saying that
it means anybody who makes a profession of
compiling and studying statistics, we have
committed this error." (Brooks and Warren,
79)

Page 123
The standard dictionary practice usually undoes this
rhetorical principle. It not only allows but practically
necessitates "using in a definition a form of the word being
defined provided the base word is properly defined elsewhere
in the same dictionary (usually just above or below); e.g. at
dream vl; 'to have dreams.' If this practice were not

acceptable, the result would be 1) a large drop in the total

number of words that can be defined and 2) poorer
definitions." (Gove, 1965: 231— his italics) The entry words

in a dictionary do not exist in a vacuum, after all. Words

that serve as bases will appear as part of the definitions of
derivative forms or words that have functionally shifted.

What for some would thus be out and out circularity—

flawed defining because a definition ought not contain a root
or derivative of a word being defined— is required for the

lexicographer who seeks economy and accuracy in definition.

Obviously sense 1 of dream above would suffer economically if

the definition had to be reformulated to avoid circularity as

in "to have a series of thoughts, pictures, or feelings which

come to a person during sleep or to have a dreamlike vision."

Since the noun dream (n) is immediately defined above the
verbal sense, to not repeat it here oversteps practicality

and, more significantly, is defining inaccurately. While a

definer would capture the whole meaning of the verb dream by

using the noun dream, to circumvent repetition, something

less than the possible above definition would inadequately

serve to substitute.

Page 124
 The lexicographical metalanguage's Internal consistency
is underscored by a dictionary's numerical and alphabetical
ordering scheme in definitions. A user's lexicographical
literacy demands constant adherence to the mechanical con­

sistency of a dictionary's definitional treatment. This

dedication for the user must prevail against the quickly

augmenting complexity and confusability of larger, multi­

sensed entries. Typically, different senses of a lexeme are

separated by boldface Arabic numerals, each followed by a

period or colon and terminating in a blank typographical

space before the next digit, if there is one. To wit,

elastic...adj. ...1. having the property of im-
mediately returning to its original size,...;
springy 2. having the ability to recover
easily from dejection,... 3. readily changed...
-n. 1. a loosely woven fabric... 2. a band,
garter,... 3. a rubber band...(WNWDC2)

Subsenses of primary senses are marked customarily by

boldface lowercase Roman letters, sometimes italicized, each
followed by a parenthesis or a colon and ending in a typo­

graphical space. For example,

list... n^ ... 1. formerly a narrow strip of
boundary; specif., a) a strip of cloth b)
a stripe of color c) a boundary— (WNWDC2)

The subsenses can be drawn to radiate further into sub­

senses of their own, calling for distinctive typographical

marking. In this less frequent case, now the extended

lesser senses are entered in light face Arabic numerals

within parentheses and followed by the punctuation mark that

introduces the definitional writing. For example,

Page 125
 apron... 2:...b (1): a downward extension of the
frame of a piece of furniture... (2): an upward
or downward vertical extension of a wink or
lavatory... (W3)

Further division is avoided for the sake of the reader's

clarity and more so for the likelihood of the lexicographer's

having misconstrued the structure of definition. Allen
Walker Read notes that "for the lexicographer, the crucial

question about meaning is how to slice it up into manageable

units." (171) The number and range of slices of meaning

depends on a dictionary's intended audience, but ultimately

the extent of senses is as infinite as that of the uses
speakers of the language put any word to. Bosley Woolf picks

up on the paradox of this situation with the credible

question, "When do irony and metaphor cross the boundary

between rhetorical device and new meanings?" (257)

In regarding dictionary definitions as philosophically
analytic or synthetic (wherein context plays an essential

role, for which see Quine (1973) "Vagaries of Definition,"

247-250), it is very practical to think of the dictionary, in

Gleason's terms, as "an instrument to assist its user in pro­
cessing a text." (251) As such, the lexicographer's product

is quite functional, especially as it is seen as

predominantly an applied sociolinguistic endeavor with
societal repercussions rhetorically and politically. The

defining process of lexicography can be characterized

realistically as being "a short statement about some features

of the word or the object denoted by it, chosen by the

Page 126
lexicographer on the basis of his guess as to what a user
might be doing when he is looking at that word for the
definition.11 (Hanks: 1973, 252)

IV. Difficulties for Users and Lexicographers with the

Descriptive Metalanguage; Functional Sentence
Perspective of Lexicographical Writing
The metalanguage and the consistency maintained by the

lexicographer and to be followed understandably by the

dictionary user presents some formidable problems for both.

To weave a relatively sure path through the unwieldy but

methodological precision in the metalanguage of lexicography,

the ordinary user of dictionaries brings his concept of the
code of formal, institutionalized writing as an interpretive
key. The metalanguage is a pragmatic necessity for the
lexicographer and its consistent use allows him to present a
logical, uniform and impersonal perspective on the language

of his investigation.
The dictionary user comes to the work with quite dif­
ferent expectations of what he will encounter. He comes to

find information relative to the norms of society. The

information he seeks pertains to the real world which can
distort and, of course, be distorted by the well-intentioned

descriptivism of most contemporary lexicography. Here,

reference is being made not to the contentions of any

synchronic/diachronic debate, nor to what is more important,

written or oral language. The present remarks focus on the

repercussions of formal, written English literacy for' the

Page 127
user confronted by the needs of another type of literacy.

His resulting misinterpretations occur when lexicographical

writing is read more prescriptively than descriptively. For
example, the Funk and Wagnall6 New standard Dictionary runs

an entry like kaiser and details it with historical

information, but concludes with "any sovereign."
To be sure, it is not surprising that dictionaries are
thus consulted. The search for order and logic underscores
much of human endeavor. In language, this takes on the guise
of truth, correctness and all that elevates or diminishes the

user in the minds of his listeners or readers. The written

language of the dictionary can be misconstrued by the very

nature of its presentation on the dictionary page. Since the

lexical information is arranged in a certain order, what

appears first tends to suggest what is of the most signifi­

cance and what is second or third, of lesser significance or

of less frequent use. After all, this largely is the pattern

in English writing in short, abbreviated messages. What is

overlooked is the notion of markedness lexicographically
where labels, variant spellings, variant pronunciations and

non-initial senses are indicative of lesser prestige extra­

linguist ically.
This is nowhere more apparent than in semantically
ordered dictionaries and accounts for some minor problems
when consulting historically ordered ones. Secondary and
tertiary spellings and pronunciations are indirectly tagged

by readers as somehow less desirable. When no variants are

Page 128
listed (and this is usually a matter of simplification for
the reader or one of commercial exigency), frequently the
user is inclined to believe that there is and can be no other
"correct" or "right" form. Thus the marked status of lexi­
cographical omission can inform the user negatively. This is
an inevitable result of contemporary standardization. Not
only are spellings fixed but the meanings of words become
rather restricted to the extent of the senses listed in any

one entry. All dictionaries are naturally closed catalogs by

the very nature of their being texts.

To call attention to the real-world phenomena under­

scoring the so-called logicalities of any natural language

and their articulation by both lexicographers and dictionary

users, discussion needs be made of some of the general tenets

of literacy of formal writing. Unlike much written language,
that of the dictionary page is composed for the communication
of new information— literally, that is. By "new" infor­

mation, reference is being made to that which is either

completely unknown or vaguely known to the user before his

consultation. "New" can thus also be interpreted as

"clarificational." The user brings to his consultation much

"given" information, of course— a relative literacy in the

basic code of institutional, formal writing and a relative

familiarity with the make-up and operation of one or more

particular language registers.

The written discourse of lexicography is static in that
it is disconnected, bearing little, if none at all, reference

Page 129
to what immediately precedes any particular entry. Each

entry is £or the most part to be read in isolation (in fact,

most consulters seek one entry, digest its information and

are done with their consultation). Lexicographical writing

is static also for its avoidance of actual functioning

verbs — what tend to be employed are infinitival forms in
verb explications and participial forms that attach to head
words in nouns and to the delimited quality that inheres in

adjectives. To be sure, there are many actual impersonal

third person usages of verbs, but only in subordinate,

relative clauses. For example, under armature, 2b: "a part

which consists essentially of coils of wire. . ." and under

aspen: "any of several poplars. . .with leaves that flutter
in the highest wind because of their flattened petioles."

(Examples from Webster's Ninth Collegiate)

"Functional sentence perspective" analysis works to un­

cover the syntactic and stylistic variables that determine

the effectiveness that certain sentence elements have on

meaning. Most such analyses ultimately are concerned with

establishing the distribution of degrees of "communicative

dynamism" by reference to the interplay of three factors:

linear modification, context and semantic structure. A con­

sideration of these three things will help to get at how

definers define, how definitions inform dictionary users and
significantly, how the metalinguistic presentation comes to

influence not only the users' understanding of an acceptable

indeed appropriate, way to compose their own writing.

Page 130
 Coined by Dwight Bolinger (1952), he summarizes the
operation of "linear modification" as such— the "gradation of
position creates gradation of meaning when there are no
interfering factors." (1125) Provided that there are no

interfering factors, then, the communicative importance of

the sentence elements, by Bolinger*s train of thought, gains
intensity in the movement toward the end of the sentence,
with the final element most important because it terminates
the communicative purpose of the sentence. Thus an element
with a higher degree of communicative importance more readily
contributes to the developing of a line of communication than

would an element of lower degree.

An examination of several sentences will highlight this
notion of communicative increase by constituent position in

English. To use some of Firmas's examples,

(1) He could not attend the lecture because he was ill.

(2) Because he was ill, he could not attend the

lecture.
(3) He went to London in order to meet a friend.
(4) In order to meet a friend, he went to London.
(1986, 43)

With the pronominal subjects to be disregarded here for their

conveyance of Known information, the final sentence elements

realize the communicative purpose of each phrase: (1) states

the cause of the man's absence from the lecture; (2) the fact
of his absence and (3) states the purpose of the man’s trip;

(4) the destination of the trip.

Page 131
 Lexicographical writing proceeds after the entry word

paraphrastically and tersely through one or more senses.

Typical of definition composition is the analytical method
whereby a genus is determined and qualifying differentiae
enclose a sense's scope. The word or words indicating a
lexeme's genus appear initially in contrast with the conven­
tional working of linear modification and communicative
increase. For example, from the W3:

terrarium... 1: a vivarium for terrestrial animals

2: a fully enclosed wholly or predominantly glass
container...for the indoor cultivation of moisture-
loving plants...

terse... la archaic: freed of debris or roughness

b smoothly elegant... 2: devoid of superfluity
tessellate... 1: to decorate with or as if with
tesserae: make a mosaic of... 2 archaic: to fit
into or as if into a mosaic

These three abridged entries typify how the initial word of

the same part of speech receives the highest degree of

communicative importance and the following differentiae

lesser degrees. Each new sense or subsense begins again a
new consideration of the communicative dynamism. Preposi­

tional phrases closest to the genus word share equally in the

highest degree of communication.

Unlike most formal institutional writing, lexico­

graphical writing is saturated with the elements of

communicative importance, all working towards the realization
of the communicative purpose of the definition. Since lexi­

cographical writing must operate on conciseness, practically

all definitional elements are significant, with there being

Page 132
only a slightly diminishing degree of communicative
importance as the definition exhausts itself. This occurs
with a user’s increasing unclarity due to some definitions'

multiple use of relative clauses, capitals, small capitals,

lower case, italics, parentheses, abbreviations and other
various marks of punctuation.
The aforementioned interfering factors to linear modi­
fication are those of the context and semantic structure

which, under certain conditions, can run against the

climacticizing development of linear gradation. Context and
semantic structure usually do modify the degree and

functional realization of communicative dynamism in ways

beyond simple linear position.

Regarding context, information recoverable immediately

from preceding text is communicatively less important. So

also is that derived from the more abstract relevant

situational context. Typically fronted in written sentences,

given information carries low degrees of communicative

dynamism. But irrespective of sentence position, it con­
tributes less to the further development of the communication
as it does not serve to fulfill the communicative purpose.
Retrievable information or context-dependent elements are
typically conveyed by pronouns and morphemic expressions of

person and number or, obviously, reiterated data relevant to

the understanding of the sentence. For example, in the

following sentences, the italicized noun phrases express

(here) easily retrievable information and are thereby

Page 133
context-dependent.
(5) Yes, I have bought the book.

(6) so, thatbook you want to read.

(7) If I had your book, I ’d return it.
Despite their reference, then, any such context-dependent

information is superior hierarchically to linearmodifi­

cation. And it isalso to be regarded as working counter to
semantic structure in signalling degrees of communicative

dynamism.
Context-dependence or independence for user's under­

standing in definitions is lexicographically an arguable

concern for most non-specialist terms. Recoverable
information from the prior text is irrelevant for most users
of the dictionary since there is no prior text to speak of.

Definitions are typically couched in language relatively free

of either context-dependent or relative pronouns because such
phraseology tends to inflate the length of the definition.

Consider the unsimplistic but precise definition of

feather. . . one of the light epidermal
outgrowths that form the external covering
of the body of birds and that consist of a
shaft bearing on each side a series of barbs
which bear barbules which in turn bear bar-
biceis commonly ending in hooked hamuli and
interlocking with the barbicules of an
adjacent barb to link the barbs into a con­
tinuous vane. (MW9; my italics)

Such a definition as the above reflects the lexico­

graphical practice of running all necessary differentiae

sequentially off the genus identification. Taken to an
extreme, as the W3 style of defining in a "completely

Page 134
analytical one-phrase definition...[in which] the headword...
is intended to be modified only by structural elements

restrictive in some degree and essential to each others."

(Gove: 1961: 6a) Chapman points to some difficulties for the

user, though, on the occasion when the defining pattern works

clumsily.
"To follow such a style unrelentingly ends
in robbing the definer of some thoroughly
natural and lucid devices of English writing,
and often produces collocations that are
inferior to ordinary English with ordinary
punctuation. . .

[For example,]
drunk... being in a condition caused by
alcoholic drink in which the control of
the faculties is impaired and inhibitions
are broken and in later stages of which
one tends toward or reaches insensibility

fermata... a prolongation at the discretion

of a performer of a musical note, cord, or
rest beyond its given time value
In each instance the style forces ambiguity and
compels compels the reader to backtrack. Style
here defeats Sprachgefuhl." (1967: 206)

When the semantic content of a definition is context-

independent for the most part, it too can run counter to

basic uninfluenced linear modification. This means, simply
put, that the position of context-independent referent is not
as important to the realization of communicative purpose.

The context-independent unit (italicized below) has a higher

degree of communicative dynamism:

I®) h girl canie into the room.

Page 135
 {9) New apartments rose on the outskirts of our town.
(10) A computer composed a number of powerful
symphonies.
In these three sample sentences, the subjects refer to the
appearance or existence of a certain phenomenon and the verbs

denote the actual appearing or existing. Being context-

independent, these subjects carry the most important piece of

information.
Definitionally, the headword initiating a lexeme's

explication typically refers to a subject highest in

communicative importance. It doesn't necessarily appear
first and, in fact, there tend to be multiple headwords of
equal value, either as disjunctives (KILN... an oven,
furnace, or heated enclosure... ) or separately in main
clauses (different senses). Yet headwords in definitions are
carriers of the greatest degree of communicative dynamism and

do usually come at the fore if they are not simply general

quantifiers or abstract relative pronouns ("one of," "any

of," "a group of").

Context plays the dominant role in the assignation of
communicative dynamism. It is the context, then, of known
and unknown information that realizes the direction of
development in a sentence. Should the starting point of the
development be a previously-cited element of information,
then it accrues less dynamism, but should it be of new

status, then it gains greater dynamism. Put differently,

while the linear arrangement of sentence elements offers a

fundamental and beginning perspective of communicative

Page 136
dynamism, the context, as made evident in the semantic
structure of given and new information, controls the dynamism
of a sentence's elements.
For the dictionary user, the processing of information
in a definition works on his acknowledgement of equal value
for sequential clauses to be given each new headword. Not to
do otherwise is an invitation to unclarity and imprecise
understanding. Formal, institutional literacy inclines most
educated readers to so misinterpret definitional writing.

V. Dialogic Perspective on Lexicographical Meaning

So what is it that lexicographers do to language for the

dictionary user? To respond that they explicitly describe

not only what words are, how they are pronounced, syllabified
and spelled, what syntactic function they typically serve,

and most importantly, what they mean is to take but a super­

ficial perspective of lexicography. Such would be an off­
handed acknowledgement of lexicographers' ultimate authority
over the business of words. That their descriptions are
encoded in printed language presupposes readers who can

understandably decode their writings.

The Russian philosopher and semiotician, Mikhail Bakhtin

noted that language is inherently dialogic. It is not "a

secondary activity requiring the speaker to find adequate

words and expressions to describe and report inner states and

fixed meanings." (Nystrand, 33) This is largely the view of
language after the ideational fact as promulgated by Wundt,

Page 137
Husserl, Ong and others, for example. Writing involves more
than "simply externalizing, transcribing, or Inscribing
thoughts with all due respect for convention and context. . .
The salient features of written text are not just so many
arbitrary conventions somehow to be taken into account while
writing." (Nystrand, 33) Lexicographical writing addresses
readers who will transform the printed message to fit their

purposes at hand.
For Bakhtin, not only are the material resources of the
medium social in origin, but also the choices writers make at
every turn are composed by the balance their written dis­

course must set between what they have to say and the
context in which the text must function. He writes that

"every...prose discourse... cannot fail to

be oriented toward the 1already uttered,'
the 'already known,' the 'common opinion,'
and so forth. The dialogic orientation of
discourse is a phenomenon that is...a pro­
perty of any discourse. It is the natural
orientation of any living discourse."
(1981: 279)

A text is thus never the simple result of an

individual's language production but always what a writer
does vis-a-vis a reader— it is "the product of the reciprocal
relationship between...addresser and addressee..." (Bakhtin,

1973: 85)
The word is always oriented toward an addressee,
toward who that addressee might be... Each person's
inner world, and thought has its stabilized social
audience (Bakhtin's italics) that comprises tbe
environments in which reasons, motives, values and
so on are fashioned... the word is a two-sided act.
It is determined equally by whose word it is and
for whom it is meant... .Each and every word

Page 138
 expresses the one relation to the other. I give
myself verbal shape from another's point of view,
ultimately from the point of view of the community
to which I belong. A word is territory shared by
both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and
his interlocuter. (Bakhtin; 1973, 85-86)

Bakhtin's approach to language opposes the abstract

linguistics of Saussure, whose main focus was on the

systematic, normative properties of ^a langue. While the
individual "speech facts" of la parole are "heterogeneous"

and unsystematic and thereby unanalyzable per se, Saussure

argued that together "some sort of average will be set up."

(Saussure, 1959: 9) This average constitutes la langue. His

distinction regards individual speech acts as evidence for

articulating language as a system. He wrote, "As soon as we

give language first place among the facts of speech, we

introduce a natural order into a mass that lends itself to no
other classification." (9) This approach posits the
character of language as prior to itself ontologically. This

means to say that, first, language is a "something" (a

collection of grammatical rules, for example) and only
secondarily a use. It was against this abstraction of speech
acts that Bakhtin reacted and instead focused on the dynamics

of communication in discrete social contexts.

For Bakhtin, any text is shaped by the reciprocal
relationship of speaker/writer and listener/reader and the
meaning of the text is reciprocally formed by the writer's
intentions and the reader's interests as they work in the

context of use. "In essence, meaning belongs to a word in

Page 139
its position between [writers/readers]; that is, meaning is
realized only in the process of active responsive under­
standing." (Bakhtin, 1973: 102) The exact meaning of a text

will vary according to different readers at different

occasions, (or even the same reader at different occasions)
since they likely have different interests. Writing is thus

dialogic in its communicative structure in that what the

writer chooses lexically or syntactically to say is mitigated

by the reader's needs in understanding.
Bakhtin's writings on meaning do bear most directly on

oral semantics and the notion that the set of semantic

variables embracing speaker and listener presumptions and
intentions is constantly being modified and redefined. Yet

Macovsky sees in the continual recreation of lexical

standards not so much a call for abandoning lexicographical
description and clarification of lexical items, but rather a
reinforcement for such practices. He argues that a speaker

in fact depends on dictionaries in order to insure that he

maintains not only his own standard, but that of the col­
lectivity. As such, the dictionary is prescriptive insofar
as it impedes language change to sustain interpretive
consistency for an audience, thus standardizing the writing

of language. (Macovsky: 6-8)

Nystrand notes that "the shape and direction of dis­

course are configured by the communicative need of writers to

balance their own purposes and intentions with the expecta­

tions and needs of readers." (36) The structure of

Page 140
lexicographical language, depends not only on the writer's
meaning but also on how what the writer has to say is matched

with what the reader needs to know. This match-up reflects

the extent to which the writer and reader share knowledge.
i

This knowledge may be shared independently of the writing and

is therefore contextually irrecoverable or it may be shared
because of the writing, which is to say, it is textually
recoverable, what is shared is given information and what is

not is new information.

Gove's recognition of this in his preface to the Third

International makes explicit how the dictionary must work

from a basis of given information that is not always

textually recoverable for the most exacting or discriminating
definitions. While successful communication thus involves a
fundamental competence in the knowledge that is adjudged

"given" or "shared," this knowledge is not so much a precon­

dition for success in communicating, but is frequently

enhanced, expanded and refitted as a result of the communi­
cation. Each writer and reader, or here, lexicographer and
dictionary user, operates on the assumptions that whatever

one says or reads is relevant to the needs of the other.

The communicative process implies an underlying
mutuality between writer and reader. It is an interactive
activity in the sense that writers and readers are inter­
acting every time readers understand a written text, and
failure to understand simply means that there has been an

absence of interaction. Unlike Grice's "cooperative

Page 141
principle" for conversation ("Make your conversational con­
tribution such as is required, at the stage at which it
occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk
exchange in which you are engaged." [1975: 45]), which makes
dominant the producer of information, a socially interactive
position regards written communication as mutually dependent.

Writing is, as Halliday partially defines it:

a sociological event, a semiotic encounter
though which the meanings that constitute
the social system are exchanged. The
individual member [both writer and reader]
is, by virtue of his membership, a 'meaner,1
one who means. By his acts of meaning, and
those of other individual members, the social
reality is created, maintained in good order,
and continuously shaped and modified. (1978:
139)

As Wittgenstein (1968) sets out and Rommeveit argues,

the meaning in any written discourse depends on its inter­
pretive context. Language has meaning because its very use
construes reality— a reality of social dominance through the

dictionary. While any word typically has many potential

meanings, its precise one depends on, as Rommeveit notes,

"what at the moment of utterance [or of communication] is

taken for granted by both [discourse] partners." (1983: 18)

This Interpretive context is the ground on which the figure

of meaning is finally known.

Consequently, any particular lexicographical entry or

sense in an entry (and typically, a dictionary consulter

reads only one or two specific entries on any one particular

occasion of consultation) bears most relevant meaning

Page 142
regarding a particular context in which the user requires
illumination. The very next time a person encounters that
same word or words, its context will be different and so will
its meaning more or less. Lexicographical treatments must
therefore be flexible enough to accommodate any user's under­
standing of semantic and metaphoric expansion in a novel
context, yet firm enough not to frustrate a user's desire in

seeking information.

VI. Lexicographical Writing's Effects on User's Conceptions

of Language
Lexicographical writing affects considerably the

dictionary user's social sense of language in general and of

written language in particular. While the visible, graphic

appearance of printed language inclines the literate person

to treat language differently from his appreciation of it

orally, the typical tri- or bi-columnar set-up of the

dictionary page initiates a reorientation to language in its
text. The different type fonts and the various boldfaces
compel the user to take more seriously or ex-officio the

information presented. Yet, if the dictionary succeeds in

any philosophical reorientation to a conception of language,

it does so by its objectification and atomization of words.

Words become easily objectified when transformed from

sound to writing. Fluid ephemoral speech is checked and the

temporality of oral discourse is changed into the dimension

of spatiality.

Page 143
 Almost Invariably, words, as, lexemes will be arranged

alphabetically, letter by letter. While this treatment tends

to dissociate words disadvantageously from others in similar

fields of meaning, its practicality is obvious. What it

subtly contributes to, though, is a sense in the reader of a
materialness or tangibility to language. Words are things.
As objectified, words attain a certain autonomy in form,
function and content. The dictionary inadvertently high­
lights this division into parts and treats each according to

ordered subsystem of a word's lexicographical features. This

internal atomization of words (spelling, pronunciation, part
of speech, etc.) forces the dictionary users to deconstruct

the whole and submit it to close examination. All this lends

to a conception of language not so much as an activity of

expression and communication, but as a matter for storage or

memory.
For the dictionary user, language is manageable when
reduced to words and there is a visualization of words as

being composed of letters. Letters belong to the realm of

writing and print and thereby words are made permanent,

unchanging and subject to latter-day standardization,
visible language in spelling exerts a tremendous influence
over pronunciation. We mentally come to see disembodied
letters and, synesthetically, letters are heard as sounds, as

in the typical question of the confused person in an

introduction:

Page 144
 "I didn't understand you fully
when you said your name,
How do you spell it?"
Ultimately the dictionary's greatest power is found in
many a user's belief that "wordhood" is actually and of­

ficially granted by the dictionary. A word does not exist if

it is not in the dictionary. And if it does exist, then it
has a specific orthographic, phonetic, syntactic and semantic

appearance. As a concomitant to this power, the registered

specifications along the above lines are interpreted as
prescriptions, not as the simple descriptions the

lexicographers would argue. Given the abstractions of the

lexicographical metalanguage and the unsurprising

simplification this metalanguage undergoes when converted by
readers into recognizable messages, the dictionary maintains
firm reins on the unruly activity that is language.

Page 145
 REFERENCES
Bakhtin, Mikahil. (1973) Marxism and the Philosophy of
Language. Trans, by Ladislav Matejka and I. R.
Titunik. New York: Seminar Press.

_______ _____(1981) The Dialogic Imagination. Austin:

Univ. of Texas Press.
Bolinger, Dwight. "Linear Modification," Publications of the
Modern Language Association of America (1952) 67: 1117-
1144.

Brooks, Cleanth and Robert Penn Warren. (1979) Modern

Rhetoric, 4th ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Chapman, Robert L. "A Working Lexicographer Appraises

Webster's Third New International Dictionary," American
Speech (l"967), 42: 3, 2()2-2i0.

Coles, P. and J. L. Morgan, eds. (1975) Syntax and

Semantics, vol. 3. New York: Academic Press.

Cooper, Charles R. and Sidney Greenbaum, eds. (1986)

Studying Writing: Linguistic Approaches. Beverly
Hills, California: Sage.

Dubois, Jean and Claude. (1971) introduction a la lexico-

graphie: le dlctionnaire. Paris: Librairie Larousse.

Firmas, Jan. "On the Dynamics of Written Communication in

the Light of the Theory of Functional Sentence
Perspective" in Cooper and Greenbaum, eds. (1986), 40-
71.
Gedney, William. "Comments" in Householder and Saporta,
eds. (1975), 224-234.
Gleason, Henry A. In "Discussion" in McDavid and Duckert,
eds. (1973), 251.
Gove, Philip B. (1961) "Preface" in Webster's Third New
international Dictionary. Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-
Webster, 6a-7a.
. (1965) "Repetition in Defining," College
Composition and Communication 16: 231-236. Also in
Gove, ed. Tl5<S7).
"The Dictionary's Function" in Gove, ed.
(1967), 5-7.
Gove, Philip B., ed. (1967) The Role of the Dictionary.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

Page 146
References (continued)
Grice, H. P. "Logic and Conversation" in Cole and Morgan,
eds. (1975), 41-58.

Hanks, Patrick. In "Discussion" in McDavid and Duckert, eds.

(1973), 252.

Hartmann, R. R. K . , ed. (1983) Lexicography: Principles

and Practice. London: Academic Press.
________________. "On Theory and Practice" in Hartmann, ed.
(1983), 3-11.

Householder, Fred W. and Sol Saporta, eds. (1975) Problems

in Lexicography. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana Uni-
versity.

iannucci, James E. "Meaning Discrimination in Bilingual

Dictionaries" in Householder and Saporta, eds. (1975),
201-216.

Imbs, Paul. (1969) "Les niveaux de langue dans le

dictionnaire" in Le franyais dans le monde, vol. 69.
Paris: Larousse-Hachette, 51-60.
Landau, Sidney I. (1984) Dictionaries: The Art and Craft
of Lexicography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Macovsky, Michael S. "Lexical orality and Direct Semantic
Ratification," Modern Language Association: Lexico­
graphy Discussion Group 327, (1985) 6-8.
McDavid, Raven I. and Audrey Duckert, eds. (1973) Lexico­
graphy in English. New York Academy of Sciences,
vol. 211.
Newmeyer, Frederick J. (1986) The Politics of Linguistics.
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Nystrand, Martin. (1986) The Structure of Written Communi­
cation. New York: Academic Press.

Quemada, Bernard. (1968) Les dictionnaries de francais

moderne. 1539-1863. Paris! Dldier.
Quine, w. V. "Vagaries of Definition" in McDavid and
Duckert, eds. (1973), 247-250.
Read, Allen Walker. (1972) "Approaches to Lexicography and
Semantics" in Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 10,
Thomas sebeok, e d . The Hague: Mouton, 161-171.

Page 147
References (continued)
Rommeveit, R. (1983) "In search of a Truly Indisciplinary
Semantics," Journal of Semantics, 2 (1), 1-28.

saussure, Ferdinand de. (1959) Course in General

Linguistics. Trans, by Wade Baskin. New York: The
Philosophical Library.
Shcherba, Lev V. (1940) "Opyt Obshchey Teorii Leksikografii"
(Attempt at a General Theory of Lexicography"), Izvestia
Akademii Nauk Soyuza SSR 3: 89-117.
Twaddell, w. F. "Lexicography and People" in McDavid and
Duckert, eds. (1973), 214-220.
Urdang, Laurence. (1963) Review of Problems in Lexico­
graphy, Language 39: 587.
______________ . (1986) Personal communication.

Wilson, Kenneth G. (1987) Van Winkle's Return: Change in

American English, 1966-1986. Hanover, N.H.: University
Press of New England.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1968) Philosophical Investigations.
Trans, by G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan.

Woolf, Henry Bosley. "Definition: Practice and Illustration"

in McDavid and Duckert, eds. (1973), 253-258.
Zgusta, Ladislav et al. (1971) Manual of Lexicography. The
Hague: Mouton,

Page 148
Chapter Four: Alteration of the Internal Representation of
Language by Dictionary Users' Literacy

I. Introduction

A popular or lay conception of language is embodied in

the dictionary. Language at this level generally and funda­

mentally means "written language." "Spoken language" is

largely regarded as an informal and less valued variant. A
study of the common, everyday understanding of the

abstractions of language requires some background for

explanation. The dictionary offers such background since it

is probably the most easily accessible reference work. The

nature of its information— that is, its style of composition,

its form and its very physical appearance printed on pages is

objectified by the general public conceptually in their

understanding and appreciation of language. This is to say
the literate skill of users— their literacy— is ultimately

grounded at the fundamental level of the dictionary.

While the social practice of language literacy will
necessarily inform this Investigation into dictionary users'

internal representation of language, a particular aim here

will also be to uncover these users' ambiguous sense of a

lexicographical literacy or lack thereof. This ambiguity

derives from a relative unsureness with which society at

large regards the dictionary. This group of average citizens
with, in Malkiel's words, "wildly varying degrees of formal
education and sophistication" (1980: 55) typically consults

Page 149
dictionaries for reasons pertaining to school, business or
law, which are not entirely akin to those motivating lexi­
cographers .

Twaddell isolates the crux of the paradoxical situation

that has developed between users of dictionaries, with their
general expectations and makers of dictionaries, with their
premises and working presuppositions. He notes that lexico­

graphy is
"unusual because not only are its pro­
fessional practitioners so few, but its
consumers are so many. . . The nature of
the product of lexicographers is such
that the many consumers are almost
unanimously unaware of the way that
product is produced and they are there­
fore all too likely to attribute to the
product virtues which it does not and
cannot possess. . . The unquestioning
faith in the orthography and phonology
of a dictionary is often extended also
to its definitional and stylistic
components. . . Such users impale the
lexicographer.” (215)

This chapter seeks to identify and characterize the

broad abstractions which lay users treat the dictionary as
operating on. These generalizations lie at the base of the
lay conception of language both socially and culturally. The
focus here is not on how lexicographers and linguists view
language philosophically or practically, but rather on what

they think dictionary users think language is. of course,

attention demands to be given to what these users themselves
conceive of language as it is presented by the dictionary.

And it shall be, but necessarily in fairly secondary fashion,

that is, through not-so-incontrovertible questionnaires,

Page 150
speculations concerning these samples and equally imperfect
interviews. Needless to say, the extent of space given to
these users' lexicographical opinions will be confined to

reasonable limits in light of what J. E. Gates cautions con­

cerning the typical misunderstandings that users reveal in
their appreciation of language and the dictionary's responsi­

bility to the public readership, (personal communication,

1984) what follows tends not so much to be the converse of
previous chapters' assorted conclusions, though some of the

abstractions are. Frequently, they are quite close to, if

not actually the same, generalizations about literacy,

chirography and the development of dictionaries.

II. Language as 'officialized' in the dictionary

Historically, once people are literate in a language,
they seek to have their understanding of proper word use
affirmed in a public forum. The dictionary in Western

society is that forum. McDavid, in his "Opening Remarks" to

the 1973 international lexicographical conference in New York
City, remarked that while dictionaries developed
"in response to the rise of the middle
classes, the dissemination of knowledge
and literacy, and the general ferment of
intellectual curiosity arising from the
Renaissance and the Reformation. . .,
[they also developed not in the least
because] of the perhaps less admirable
but thoroughly comprehensible ambitions
of the newly risen and affluent to use
without stumbling the kind of language
to which the traditional upper classes
had been accustomed. The need to provide
information about language for the unin­
formed and socially insecure underlies
all subsequent lexicography." (1973: 3)

Page 151
I

While the dictionary is generally revered for consti­

tuting what many would regard as the official standard

governing the spelling, pronunciation and meaning of a word,

this reverence is vague but formidable, The first of these

governances— spelling— is probably the clearest and easiest
prescription that invites indulgence because of the simple

format. Spell the word in this way. Not to follow the

standardized orthography is to be judged ignorant or stupid.

While troublesome if not observed, the general public does

not invest this injunction solemnly for distant or anonymous

writers. Yet a standard spelling is what makes for a

standard written language in social, commercial and

educational discourse.
Pronunciation gains a far less critical appreciation for
most dictionary users. All but the most avid perusers of

dictionaries are not familiar with phonetic conventions

informing the parenthetical pronunciation of words.
Dictionary use is reserved largely for matters of spelling

and meaning verification with writers— speakers, if unsure of

pronunciation, are more likely to consult others' opinions.

Quirk notes in his article on the social impact of

dictionaries in Great Britain that along "with. . .pronuncia­

tion, difficulty is associated with the unfamiliarity.that

proceeds from infrequent dictionary use." (1973: 83)

There is a widespread sense in people that words carry

specific, identifiable meanings. With spoken and written

language all about in the lives of human beings, a wish

Page 152
exists unconsciously in them (consciously for some, notably
language teachers) for simple, straightforward meanings in

lexical items. A black and white world in the meaning of

words would make for a best of all possible worlds. Under­

neath any stylistic charm or enviable syntactic
constructions, many see or hope for a concrete lexical
substructure that will base everyone's lexical knowledge. If
only everyone would agree on what words mean, there wouldn't

be any confusion.
On the smaller scale of student dictionary use, clarity
and comprehensibility of dictionary definitions constitute

the greatest area of deficit. Quirk found that "although...

meaning and definition are of central importance to most sub­

jects, there is considerable dissatisfaction over the

dictionary's contribution in these respects. An overwhelming

majority of university students apparently experience

difficulty in understanding the metalanguage in which
definition is expressed." (1973: 84) Greenbaum ran across
the same misgivings among American college students. "The
majority of suggestions dealing with meaning asked for the

definitions to be more comprehensible." (1984: 45)

While the immediately preceding perceptions pertain to
college students who have a ready need for such information,
similar demands are felt by others. Ironically, though, most

people will still repair to dictionaries for semantic clari­

fication despite some dissatisfaction with any one

dictionary. This trust in the ultimate uncovering of a

Page 153
word's meaning in a dictionary and the belief that there must
be a meaning captured and officialized by the dictionary, to
re-cite Twaddell, "impale the lexicographer." He has
responsibility to all those who wish the arbitrage of an

authoritative body concerning language, conferred by most

dictionary users. In modern society, the "last word," so to
speak, is that printed in a dictionary. The seal of

authority is affixed by it.

III. Language as ’authorized’ by the dictionary
As language (or the corpus of which is deemed acceptable

and proper) is officialized by Inclusion in a dictionary,

this vehicle of officializing must have first been given
authority in language matters. This authority as granter of
a linguistic seal of approval developed over centuries as
written language and then printed language commanded greater
and greater respect. The seeming indelibility of such
language imbued it in the popular mind with unassailable
power. Man has long been a subject to some higher authority,

be it divine, royal or civil and this subordination extends

to various other domains influencing his life. For Western

man and woman, daily life is regulated and constrained by

pervasive legal codes. Their language, both oral and

written, has fallen frequently in the twentieth century into

the courts for judicial interpretation.

Jennifer Robinson has surveyed some of the issues in­

volved and cites decisions in American courts where dic­

tionaries have been introduced as evidence. (1982: 110-17)

Page 154
Lexicographers who have testified in the courtroom note how
difficult it is to give their opinions about words as trade­

marks, service names and other names that governments allow

people to register and own. Making their views intelligible

to judges and juries, particularly when the question and

answer format of a proceeding does not allow them time or
opportunity enough to expand upon these views, lexicographers
acknowledge that their testimonies do not ever present all

the nuances of their lexical opinions. Yet they serve the

legal system in reaching decisions in black and white ways

that real language cannot ever really be appreciated by

semantically.

In 1966, for example, after first being refused by the

United States Patent office, Eastern Air Lines was permitted

to register the name and designation "Air Shuttle" to

describe its passenger service between Boston, New York and
Washington. Yet, in 1980, a competing line, New York Air,

introduced a "shuttle" service in the same market and pro­

moted it with the term "shuttle." Eastern sued and after

hearing from two long-experienced lexicographers, Jess Stein

and Allen walker Read, Judge Milton Pollack ruled the term

"shuttle” is generic.
Stein argued on behalf of New York Air that "shuttle"
was generic and Read claimed Eastern’s history with its "Air
Shuttle" service had created a specialized meaning for "shut­

tle" for which it could claim a propietary right. For his

testimony, stein cited a cross-section of dictionaries,

Page 155
thesauruses and encyclopedias. The word, as noted in these
works, has four essential characteristics in the context of

transportation: 1) it is a vehicle or a service using such a

vehicle, 2) it goes back and forth between two or more

points, 3) the distance between these points is not great and

4) the trips are frequent and regular. The term "air
shuttle" is generic to air transportation service in
accordance with standard English usage.

Read, for his part, took up how the so-called meaning of

words is established. Traditionally, meanings have indepen­
dent existences apart from how people talk. However, the

leading authorities in lexicography have come to the

consensus that how people use words in context is the most
important factor. The meaning of a word can be determined

only in examination of all the elements of a word's usage in

any context. Context determines the way people use words.

In the case of "shuttle" and "air-shuttle," the association

with Eastern and the service Eastern provided has become
integral and necessary to the meaning. The word "shuttle" is

familiar now in English through its connection with Eastern’s

Air-Shuttle service and has been made so through Eastern's

success and promotion of the service. [Read (1984), 53-65]

The testimony of a commercial dictionary in reaching a

verdict in courts of law has often been a decisive factor.
The general American public has an unshakable faith in the
dictionary and, "no matter what [its] size, age, publisher or
purpose, [it] is thought to contain all the meanings of all

Page 156
the words in the language." (Robinson, 110) Lexicography
is, however, far from science. While there can be no dis­
agreement among dictionaries regarding the alphabetical order

of words, there is frequently dissent about the precise

definition of many words that appear in all dictionaries.
Because any language is always growing and changing, disputes
will often arise over the proper or improper way to use a
word or what is the "right" or "wrong" meaning of a word. As
Robinson concludes, "Although it is standard practice to rely

on a dictionary as evidence when these are everyday matters,

when the consequences are greater, a dictionary cannot be

considered as the decisive witness." (116)

IV. Language as 'standardized' in the dictionary

With language widely perceived as operating by some
formal organizational patterns above conventional and
fundamental grammatical principles, the dictionary has become
the nominal respository for such indicators of socio-cultural

standing. While most people can easily recognize and

generally pay no conscious attention to the variety of

accents and gross dialectal features in the oral language

that engulfs them, when pressed, these same people will

tacitly acknowledge more subtle differences in the format of

written language. An indefinable, even vague sense of what

"sounds right" in print is possessed by native speakers—

otherwise known in Chomskyan terms as "native competence."
This sense feeds into an awareness of a formal code to which
all prestigious writing adheres, which accounts for why they

Page 157
consult dictionaries. This kind of writing is replete with

vocabulary that is found unmarked in the dictionary with

"informal," "slang," or "jargon" restrictive labels. The
dictionary elevates the standard language, or that which
comprises all lexemes without usage notes. It is the dialect
against which all others in the language are measured.
Standardizing a language means to say that any word or sense

of a word whose use would trigger notice along temporal,

regional, stylistic, technical or cultural lines is tagged
for its conspicuousness. These signalling devices superfi­
cially appear to be appropriate for lexicographical dis­

semination by virtue of their worth in objectively detailing

the relative values of words.

Referring to the purposes of the dictionary or the kind

of things a dictionary should be designed to do, Barnhart

first approaches the issue by invoking the needs of the user.
He writes that a dictionary should "answer the questions that

the user. . .asks, and dictionaries on the commercial market

will be successful in proportion to the extent to which they

answer these questions of the buyer." (1975: 161) So while

the range of users and uses of dictionaries is vast, a
dictionary obtains its philosophical right of publication by

not only recording the historical development of words,

acquainting its users of language in varieties other than
their own, supplying information incidental to the preceding
types, but also, significantly, by guiding what one should do

and especially what one should not do in matters of

Page 158
linguistic etiquette. This latter function rests uncomfor­
tably with descriptive linguists per se, yet attests ulti­

mately to the responsibility of dictionaries in representing

the social realities of the language of the strong and

powerful in daily life.

This social reality includes the prescriptivism of those

who would be our betters and also the linguistic insecurity

of those who aspire to be as prestigious as our betters. Not
only does it matter what a word denotes in the abstract and

in the concrete, it also matters what impression a word gives

a receiver. Theoretically, in referring to a sweeping
proposition of J. R. Ayto, there is no such thing as
connotation, for the sake of lexicography. He means by this

that unless any connotative aura surrounding a word can be

analyzed and isolated as contributing to "a discrete
denotative sense of that word,” it shouldn't belong in the

dictionary.” (96) While this proposition is based on a

strict interpretation of linguistic theory, the
lexicographer's duty is not to present principles of semantic
analysis. An understanding of these principles provides only
a starting point for him in composing definitions that make

sense to the user. The lexicographer serves the language

user who, to paraphrase Hartmann, motivates dictionaries and

judges them against his lexical needs. (1983: 5)

A need for usage information about words moves many a

person to consult a dictionary. Such a situation arises

infrequently for most and when it does, the definition comes

Page 159
in qualified terms like "sometimes/" "often/" "usually/" and
"especially.” These are additional hedges to those already
appearing after labels that identify a word as anything other
than part of standard usage, what is standard will always
inspire controversy, though, to be sure, an examination of
usage can be artificially confined to a set scale of usage
values. Various writers have undertaken to present these
guidelines and one whose sampling mirrors this 'objective or
logical categorization,' Virginia McDavid, also cautions in a

pat, descriptivist way the dictionary user in hastily

accepting lexicographic prescriptions. She writes that "no

set of usage labels will be valid for all time, what was a

favored term or pronunciation at one time may have a very

different status at a later one... Any set of principles can

only guide a reader or listener, and such principles will

change as practices and opinions change." (1979: 34) She

follows her admonition in an appendix with a five-part
classification of categories with each breaking down into
multiple subclassifications. (34-35)
Of most immediate concern to people needing the lexi­

cographer's advice is that for enlightenment of a particular

status governing particular words, i.e., their relative
formality or informality. Though determinations in this
regard are extremely varied in range and there frequently is

no consensus among assorted dictionaries, information about

style (humorous to literacy) and status (nonstandard to

overly formal) is more often sought by writers wishing help

Page 160
then other types of less vague Information, such as In
technical, regional, vulgar or offensive matters, of course,

it is an entirely different situation for those who are not

native speakers.
over the course of the history of lexicography, there
have been various schemes designed to establish what was to
be considered as proper, appropriate or even standard.
Passing from an ostensibly prescriptivist tone in pre­
twentieth century dictionaries to a so-called descriptivist
bent over this century, notions about how to demarcate the
language credibly have generally come to rest for the present

around distinctions drawn according to the social situations

enveloping any word's usage. Kenyon’s seminal article on

"Cultural Levels and Functional Varieties of English" (1948)

set the stage for the socio-cultural orientation of modern

dictionaries. For lexicographical purposes, reality for the

language is normatively cast in notions of the standard.

What falls outside this area is made plainly evident in

dictionaries by the unplain markers of restrictive labeling.

V. Language as 'finite' within the dictionary

Not knowing of the lexicographers’ purpose generally or

specifically, dictionary users work preponderantly from

intuitive presumptions and school-learnt adages about what
dictionaries should or should not contain. Surprisingly,
Arnold wonders critically about people who neglect to read

the prefatory material introducing their dictionaries. This

information

Page 161
 "often makes explicit what a user can and
cannot expect from a dictionary. . . [Editors]
note that words exist in a very artificial
situation completely divorced from a context
which may alter meaning considerably. They
also remind the user that meaning is always
changing, that words regularly may undergo
the processes of generalization, speciali­
zation, amelioration, and pejoration.
(1981: 72)

She subsequently refers to the descriptive/prescriptive

intent of dictionaries in the handling of everything from

pronunciation to usage and, unsurprisingly for the lexico­

grapher she is in late 20th-century America, roundly affirms

the descriptive stance. Arnold warns that "information

[along a prescriptive line] can only foster the development
of erroneous language prejudices in a student user." (72)

Such prejudices emanate not in the least from dictionary

editors themselves. William Morris in the "Introduction" to
the American Heritage Dictionary presents his as an infal­

lible authority on the business of words and their usage. He

writes that the AHD editors

"have felt a deep sense of responsibility as
custodians of the American tradition in
language as well as history. Consequently,
at a time when the language, already a his­
torical melting pot, is under constant chal­
lenge— from the scientist, the bureaucrat,
the broadcaster, the innovator of every
stripe, even the voyager in space— they
undertook to prepare a new dictionary. It
would faithfully record our language, the
duty of any lexicographer, but it would not,
like so many others in these permissive times,
rest there. On the contrary it would add
the essential dimension of guidance, that
sensible guidance toward grace and precision
which intelligent people seek in a dictionary."
(1976: vii)

Page 162
 - Throughout the lexicographical controversy since the
publication of the W 3 , there has been, as Raven McDavid

decries," an emphasis on the trivial details of manners, with

the implicit assumption that the public needs to be told what

is right. . . The functions of the dictionary as the

historical record, or as the purveyor of the knowledge of
something new, pale in the public eye beside its function as

a molder of behavior." (1979: 23) Deriving from this

perspective on language (and perhaps an Integral part of it),

users, ably assisted by the comprehensiveness of the larger

dictionaries, subscribe to the old folk belief that a word

doesn't exist if not entered in a dictionary. Such a belief

presupposes that there is a finite number to the amount of

words, that whatever this amount comprises (what is a word,

after all?)— morphologically, grammatically or semantically—

it is hypothetically knowable and that this amount is

consequently capturable in the "unabridged" or largest

dictionary. Above all, what this belief points to is an

underlying sense in the countability of words, as if the

language were constructed of separable entities that could be
toted up mechanically, much like an inventory in a department

store.

VI. Words as objects

This perception takes its root in many language pheno­
mena, both spoken and written. It bears its greatest fruits
though, in situations calling for what Joos specifies as the
formal styles. (1961) While he is most concerned in his book

Page 163
about styles of speech, analogizing them to five clocks which
record five different times, the extensive metaphor lends
itself credibly to writing styles also. By Joos, the formal

style disallows listener participation and is used to inform,

being more impersonal and more cohesive in sentence
structure. Dictionaries operate within this formal style
since their controlling aim is the communication of ideas.
Those who refer to dictionaries do so for assistance in close
reading and, importantly, for precise writing— in contexts

more closely related to Joos’s consultative and casual

styles, in addition to the formal.
introspectively, most users conceive of language as it
pertains to certain functions. While one is infrequently
conscious of choosing particular words in conversation or

other informal, oral situations, a person more often is quite

aware of the make-up of his written messages. There are

relatively few published works that inform or generally

expound on speech per se. Dictionaries are not based on the

spoken language, despite the NCTE's third principle that

"spoken language is the language." (1952: 12) Landau

astutely notes that

"in fact, we have no dictionaries that
represent the spoken language, though such
dictionaries are possible. . . One can
conceive of a large dictionary with all
the elements of a general adult dic­
tionary whose entries consist solely
of spoken forms. Such a dictionary need
not and probably would not be arranged
alphabetically, but by an arbitrary
sequence of phonemes. Written forms

Page 164
 might be Included in our orthographic dic­
tionaries, but they would serve the sub­
sidiary purpose of linking various ortho­
graphic forms with the speech sounds
corresponding to dictionary entries."
(1984: 208)

The source of confusion here goes back to the misunder­

standing that language is also the written language. Yet
popularly and lexicographically, the grand abstraction of

language is concretized and familiarized in printed format.

While language is both oral and written and each is equally

pervasive in the lives of modern man and woman, the latter

more easily predominates in thoughts of what is more

prestigious and authoritative. Consequently, in a self-

consciousness of language, that is, objectively and not

subjectively, the word is transformed mentally into a
dimension of spatiality. We see letters with our inward eyes
when calling to mind either an individual spoken word or a
printed or written word. Psychologically, this marks a

dramatic shift for modern Western man (not exclusively or

inclusively, to be sure) from his precursors.

VII. Words as atomizable and orderable in the dictionary

Lexicographical treatments of words as objects—

linguistic, philosophical, psychological, what have you—

generally correspond to lay users* rough conceptions of what

words are. While this correspondence may, in fact, be more

of a learned and imitative response, it is not too arguable

to presume that written exempla of language are more

indicative of what constitutes a practical basis for most

Page 165
people In discussing language as a system with a definable
structure— more indicative than are spoken citations. Quirk

inadvertently draws a comparable case of this when he notes

that more of us remain unfamiliar with the sounds of our own
voices and are surprised when hearing ourselves on tape.
Just the same, we recognize our own handwriting very well.

(1968: 90)
Being understood as objects, written words can then sub­
mit to an easy breakdown on a graphemic and printed level to

individual letters, on a morphologic level to content and

grammatical morphemes, (though, assuredly in other terms) and

on a semantic level to semantic markers. This third level’s
phrasing is taken from the influential study by Jerrold Katz
and Jerry Fodor, "The structure of a Semantic Theory." They

regard these markers as the elements in terms of which

semantic relations are expressed; as "atomic concepts. . .
[that] exhibit the semantic structure jUi a dictionary entry
and the semantic relations between dictionary entries."

(187, 186)
They illustrate their approach to a semantic theory with

an example from lexicographic practice:

Fig. 1 (185)
1. a young knight serving under the
standard of another knight

2. one who possesses the first or

lowest academic degree
bachelor noun
3. a man who has never married

4. a young fur seal when without a

mate during the breeding time

Page 166
 This type of working diagram needs revision since, as
Katz and Fodor note, its characterizations are unsystematic

and should make obvious the atomic 'markers' and the marker's
subordinate and qualifying 'distinguishes.' Their Figure 2
reveals these amendments, with the semantic markers in

parentheses and the distinguishers in brackets:

Fig. 2 (186)
bachelor
noun
(Human) (Animal)

(Male) [who has the first (Male)

or lowest academic
degree]
[who has never [young knight [young fur seal
married] serving under without a mate
the standard of during the
another knight] breeding time]

Dwight Bolinger observes of such a theory that while "it

is a picture of semantic units whose outlines are sharp,"
(1965: 571) there are a number of problems that issue from
Katz and Fodor's semantic interpretations without aid or

reference to native speaker intuitions or insights. (573) He

contends that "dictionaries do not exist to define, but to
help people grasp meanings, and for this purpose their main
task is to supply a series of hints and associations that
will relate the unknown to something known." (572) People’s

general tendency to be orderly finds a correlative

orderliness in the lexicographer's system in the dictionary.
Bolinger underscores the atomization of a word's meaning for

Page 167
any person and for the dictionary by further noting that
"the dictionary has done its job when it
gives the reader a handhold in his own
experience— a pair of synonyms, a dia­
gram, a context, a comparison, tied to
any convenient reference post, and to
be a good practical lexicographer one
needs more to be vastly mindful of the
possible associations than to be a
powerful theorist. . . The success of
the dictionary is not achieved in
disregard of our knowledge of the world,
but through it and because of it." (572)

VIII. Words as composed of letters and submitting to alpha­

betization

Bolinger1s foregoing remarks pertain to the theoretical

composition of definitions and are intended for the eyes of

those in a very restricted circle. He does highlight what he

considers the weakest point in the Katz-Fodor semantic theory

and this concerns the "assumption of the minimal lexical

unit"— -the morpheme. (572) As monads that associate and

dissociate by rule and whose associations leave no trace,

their morphemic theory does not account for idioms and
collocations. All this is well and good, yet Katz and Fodor
have attempted only an approach to a semantic theory and, as

Bolinger does say "in any scientific field. . . it is useful

to make one's theoretical start from atomic entities." (555)
To enunciate a popular conception of language deriving
from the dictionary, one must ultimately or initially refer

to the idea of words being composed atomically of letters,

which preordains their alphabetization in the West to either

Roman, Cyrillic or Greek systems. Letters, of course, are

visual symbols, not sounds— just visible representations.

Page 168
The simplistic code of the letters and their ordering entails
their decoding by readers who understandably are not always
mindful of the logic of which came first or the frequent

confusion of letter/sight and sound/hearing. The general

dictionary is arranged for the convenience of its users,
which necessitates a word orientation. Although literate
people easily recognize and have been taught to recognize
that words can be morphemically reduced and expanded, this
latent knowledge is often regarded by them as tangential.

The important thing to know, and the groundwork for any of

their language analysis, is that all begins with the word—
printed, written, drawn, whatever— the word. The dictionary

is a word book, foremost. Indeed, in many languages, the ex­

pression for such a compilation is just that in translation
(German: Worterbuch, Russian: slovar1, Swedish, ordbok,

Icelandic, orthabok) . Translations from dead languages like

Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit or Old English could be made,

but they would be contrived since the idea of a dictionary,

at least as it has materialized in our modern representa­

tives, had not been conceived. Interestingly, the very

English word dictionary stems from a Latin base which focuses

on the sound behind the word.

The dictionary is composed of words in isolation. This
isolation is made all the more striking by the alphabetical

ordering of the words. This abstracts their passive ap­

pearance as simple unencoded agents of reference to a level
more abstruse. Here the entries are nothing more than an

Page 169
uncoordinated collection of words and phrases in a semantic
sense. However, the encoding of the world occurs not

entirely in words, but in different units, an unknown

totality commonly designated as the nominative means of a

language.

Productive use of this nominative means comes from a

familiarity with the lexical units’ syntagmatic and paradig­

matic manifestations in language— manifestations of which

lexicographers are only concerned with the latter for the

practical purposes of user accessibility. While it is the

writer who encodes through this nominative means, it is the

reader who decodes and is primarily targeted as the user of
dictionaries. In his study of the receptive use of the
nominative means reflected in dictionaries, P. N. Denisov

points up the system's impoverished and distorted appearance

lexicographically:
Multifaceted connections between words
and phraseologisms are destroyed. Alpha­
betical arrangement destroys all associa­
tions, points of contact and intimacy...
It is precisely the control of these
nominative means that adds vivacity and
vigor to the speech of people...(My
translation)

Composed of isolated lexical units, the dictionary, and

by this study's implication, the user's view of language, is
colored by a lens that atomizes meaning into separable bits

of reality. With such an orientation, the average user takes

these isolated bits and further dissociates them by paradig­

Page 170
matic categorization, which the lexicographer also does but
in recognition of a basic practicality of listing head words.
This does not mean to imply something is fallacious or faulty
with either the dictionary or its user in this regard, only
that the lexicographical atomization of words in both the
dictionary's microstructure of entries and its macrostructure
of entry-ordering works to re-form a person's internal
representation of language. Outside of dictionary
presentations and educational domains, language, when the

subject of thought, unfurls mentally and metaphorically in a

stream of consciousness. Within those enclosures, language

becomes written language, whose focus is the word, whose

clear structure is examined in form, function and content,
all of which are discrete entities. Dictionaries strive to
present their listings lucidly and in the time-honored

semasiological or sense-finding perspective.

The traditional alphabetical arrangement of entries puts
at a disadvantage those dictionary users who are interested

in the similarities and differences among related words.

Kipfer sees in alphabetical conventions assistance for the
user in understanding a particular headword, but as she

notes, "much more often there is information within the defi­

nitions that could lead us on to the words that express our

ideas.” (1986: 55) The method of onomasiology starts by

defining useful notions and links them to words that can
serve to identify them lexically. As such, it proceeds from
things to the expressions that denote them. The advantage of

Page 171
this approach is in the access it provides to the whole dic­
tionary through the paratactic categories that already exist.
A dictionary that starts not from things but from
meanings and offers possible lexicalizations can, as Kipfer

regards the onomasiological approach, "bring together similar

concepts, yielding semantic fields. [It] allows study of the
semantic relationships that can be set up between linguistic
symbols and the things they signify; it groups words with

more than one word (synonymy)." (63) With computer assis­

tance, this ability to access meanings directly and to have
made available semantic relationships between and among words

could serve the needs of many dictionary users at various

levels of sophistication. (See also Abate, 1985 regarding

natural language interfacing with electronic onomasiological

dictionaries.)
So while Western man, or any man or woman for that

matter, has come to internalize his language according to the

same make-up that gave it visibility by chirography and lent
it order by alphabetical formats, the dictionary has taken

this visual logic and mapped it out in single, discrete

vignettes. Here and by contemporary education teaching on

the primary and secondary levels does the literate person,

the dictionary user, form his conception of language as

letter-based words that not only designate things but are, in

themselves, things.

Page 172
XX. Words as univocal (and memorizable)
As Bakhtin reminds us of the dialogic nature to

language, our words take their meaning in the interaction of

their utterance and reception. So too do those that are
consigned to writing and print. More often than not, as
readers of writing, we neglect our part in the activity of
communication and merely take writers' words as signifying
their intentions. We forget about our own. At a conscious
level we think a written message means 'something' because
the writer intended it to mean that 'something.' Yet at a

subconscious level, it means 'something* by virtue of his

having written it and our having read it. The meaning is

ever-changing for each new reader. The semanticist I. A.

Richards was mindful of this dialogism in language and coined
the now more than nonce phrase, the "interinanimation of

words." (1963: 48)

inasmuch as all language is polysemous, there still

remains within a large number of people a linguistic

insecurity that desires prescriptions. While this unsureness
is rife among students who frequently are writing with one

eye on stylistic and content matters, and the other on the

qui vive for mechanical acceptability, any insecurity among

other writers pertains to specific, "real-life" situations of

writing that have two or three ways to work appropriately.

As Michael Montgomery remarks of his experience in responding

to questions about language from the general public,

"I have developed a profound respect for
[its] conscientiousness about using the

Page 173
 English language. Despite a current
fashionable dismay that the American
public knows and cares less and less
about writing English, my experience is
that the public is both well informed
and careful and is determined to write
it as well as possible. This dismay is,
largely unfounded and is symptomatic
of a general cultural malaise in this
country. . . [The service's callers]
call primarily to doublecheck a choice
already made. If these callers are at
all representative, they reveal a public
curious about how the language is
changing and why it varies. . . The pub­
lic. . .knows that linguistic choices
have consequences.” (1981: 107-08)

Montgomery's reference to the general American public's

determination to write English as well as possible can also

imply that these people in his view wish to know the "correct
way." He notes that "they write by rules and try to apply a
rule whenever possible, from whatever source... Many of the

rules they employ are phantoms, half-remembered from their

schooldays. . ." (109) while many of these rules concern

matters of punctuation, spelling, capitalization and hyphena­
tion, just as many cover sundry aspects of diction and

meaning.
A prevalent attitude among dictionary users marks but

one sense per word as authorized. This might seem to be a

contradiction to the actuality of polysemy in all language,
yet people seeking correctness in writing a particular word
hope to find their selection upheld by the authority of the

dictionary. This is a contrived case of universitas verbarum

or a meaning, whether in fact composed of one or more than

one sense, that is treated by the law as an indivisible

Page 174
whole. While dictionary users recognize the reality of there
being many senses to any one word and know that the
dictionary treats most words according to several senses,
they frequently read in the sense that appears first the
official pronouncement of "its meaning." what this practice
ends up doing is inclining the user to disregard all
information that follows the first sense. In effect, the

user regards subsequent senses as merely unofficial or

unauthorized or non-standard despite the dictionary’s actual

inclusion of them.
Of course, being a generalization, this markedness or
its lack does not always apply to the first sense in a

definition. At times, depending on the needs of the

dictionary consulter, a further sense will more appropriately
fulfill his aims and thus be read as the correct version.

Obviously, a user's subjectivity is being indicted here, but

this subjectivity is natural and thoroughly to be presumed of

a user making reference to a dictionary. The function of a
dictionary, to re-cite Barnhart, is "to answer the questions
that the user...asks" (1975: 161); it provides a wealth of
information beyond what any one person or group of persons
would ever need to know. The user cannot be diminished for
reading between the lines; in fact the dictionary is not a
book that one reads as he would another book of continuous
text. It is intended for occasional reference and drawn in

discontinuous patches to insure this.

Page 175
X. Language as a static phenomenon

Since the written language exists in a visual domain,

permanent in its letters and spaces to the eye of the reader

and since its existence in any one medium is timeless,

barring the influence of circumstantial factors, such

language for its recipients assumes a more formidable
presence than its spoken counterpart. It is more momentarily
unchanging in structure than speech and consequently more

enduring. In a literal sense, language that appears in

writing is a fait accompli. Once language is spoken, without

any recording devices or a transcriber, it ceases to exist.

Not surprisingly then, it is understood during the process of
deliverance and remembered to a greater or lesser extent

after its utterance as an activity performed by a person.

When language is written, just as unsurprisingly, it is

regarded as actionless for the activity of inscribing has

been concluded. The activity of reading awaits another

performer. Disregarding for the present writing for the sake
of the writer's own benefit and speaking for the sake of the
speaker's own indulgence, the written language "is" and the

spoken language "acts."

While we do have language situations that are perceived

as being written or uttered in the passive or active voice

grammatically, "real-life" actual written and spoken language

can also be understood in these same terms. Because writing

is only appreciated after the fact, its acknowledgement is as

a static phenomenon. Speaking is conversely a dynamic

Page 176
activity. The dictionary as a printed product presents
itself passively to its consulter as a reference book with a
variegated panoply of information bits largely about written

language. The information, ordered logically for alphabeti­

cal access, awaits the ordinary consulter who confirms the

validity or invalidity of his own writing or clarifies his
understanding of another's writing. It is within the
dictionary that language is treated for its own worth as
language.

In few other commonly consulted printed sources is

language ever really deconstructed for the sake of explaining

what, in effect, makes it language. Here the medium is the
message. The lexicographical .message is someone else'sr-

someone who supposedly knows what he is writing about. For

most dictionary users, the pronouncements emanate from a

someone or someones never known— just an anonymous, omnis­

cient language user. Actually, most users never really even

personify the lexicographer. Like the Bible, there is and

always was the dictionary.

It exists suspended imperiously above the writings of
all others. While the dictionary provides a vantage point on
the sociocultural realities of lexical reference, it is not a
part of them, insofar as people merely bow to its dispas­

sionate or vacuum-like messages. As Greenbaum notes of

American college students' perceptions of the dictionary,
there is "the belief that [it] has a higher status. . . in

the US than in the UK. Not only is the dictionary consulted

Page 177
more often in the us, but also less fault is found with it."
(1984: 48) The written discourse of lexicographers as
information or advice is regarded as fixed and whose communi­
cation is taken as not open to interpretation. Neglected or

just never realized is this discourse's interactive potential

with the dictionary user.

Most dictionary editors make this possibility plain in
their prefatory notes to their works. They idealistically
attempt to counteract the learned tendencies of readers,
which they are inadvertently and partially responsible for

implanting. A paradox arises for lexicographers around how

to detail objectively the linguistic structure of a language

and, at the same time, not to disregard the sociocultural

constraints of a communication system used by and for people.

As Mufwene credibly notes of this situation, "Much to the

partial credit of traditional lexicographic practice, a

linguistic dictionary. . .would account for less than the

lexical competence of a normal speaker." (1984: 1) He is

referring to the standardized language that this traditional

dictionary practice embodies and to the many elements of all

the other variations of language outside the standard, both
written and spoken, to which it gives short shrift. First is
the speaker with his native or acquired competence, then

there are the largely unwritten rules of linguistic etiquette

that unite him with other members of that language community,

and finally there is the written corpus of scientific,

cultural and linguistic signs of the dictionary. The written

Page 178
I

language Is thus distilled in the dictionary, yet imperfectly

so because it is written and because it is only an abstract
version of a system that embraces an unknowable totality of
people's uses. Mufwene points further to an ultimate and

inescapable shortcoming of the dictionary for the living

language— "the average user of a language knows not only how

to pronounce its words and combine them together into gram­

matical sentences but also what contributions each of the
Individual lexical items used in the sentences make to the

scenarios he/she wishes to share about some world with

his/her addressee." (1984: 1) The dictionary greets the

typical user with a barrage of vocabulary that is set up

against the unmarked standard by virtue of which and within

which an extensive system is formulated to regulate a formal,
prestigious variation. This user often disconcertingly finds
much that was unknown and he just as often insecurely abides

by the new information.

XI. Language in the dictionary as structure-oriented and

thereby pedagogical
The acquisition of literacy is by and large a formal

educational aim of schools. In contemporary Western society,

schooling is a social and cultural activity. Reading and

writing are also activities— practices concerning the

arrested word. Since the written language commands social

priority over the spoken language by dint of social prestige

and legal precedence, its very teaching or the substantial

beginning for most people in school establishes early on what

Page 179
eventually becomes a full-fledged practical consciousness of
so-called "real” language. Through schooling, the written
language takes on the qualities of detachment for the writer
from his audience, permanency of text, conscious organi­

zation, complexity of structure, the reproducibility of

knowledge and more facile memorizability. Pedagogy in
present-day society is founded on the written language, and

the student with good memorizational skills is quickly and

early praised for his studiousness.
This early devotion to accurate memorization is not

easily forgotten and, in fact, is developed unwittingly by

teachers in their students along with the primary dedication

to the written language. The printed word becomes the

hallmark of education and soon predominates in most

conceptions of not just language, but language that is worthy
of study or attention, whether a debate need be joined here

is secondary, since, as Stubbs writes in his work on language

and literacy, "the sociolinguist and educationalist have to

recognize that in education it is often people's beliefs,

perceptions, attitudes and prejudices which are crucial,

however false they may be on objective grounds." (1980: 30)

By their attitudes regarding the language, people mark the
written form as the form demanding their greater attention
because it is by that form that they are judged and valued.
A person's writing identifies him as do his finger­

prints, though not as unimpeachably. In this light, the

learning of how to write should be viewed as fundamental to

Page 180
the educational process. Equally fundamental is the
antecedant teaching of literate skills. Present education in

Western schools enlists the aid of the dictionary in founding

an idea of correct, standard meaning in words, along with

their proper spelling and pronunciation. The popularity and

frequency of spelling bees on radio and television quiz
programs reflect society's general feeling that one who can

spell well is to be regarded as well educated. Given the

current large numbers of school populations, it is all too
easy to see how a testing and evaluative methodology has come

to underlie most public education programs. Therein lies the

motivation for notions of correctness— they are organizing

and operating principles. It is not therefore surprising

that correctness should imbue our understanding of language

itself. While such a quality can be traced historically back

to where it arises in matters of social prestige and

privilege, it matters more at this point in the present study

that this quality be taken as pivotal in why and how the
written language functions as it does.

Against a malleable standard of correctness, schools

have long sought to measure student writing and under­
standing. That standard abstractly points to the usage of

the highly educated and socially powerful— which* might also

be a relatively superficial and circular explanation that

confuses two ultimately overlapping parameters. Reference is

being made here to the domains of social and psychological

function. The workings of the written language must be

Page 181
examined by the conflicting criteria of both the internal and
external realities of language use. The latter always dis­
rupts the former's mechanical harmony. Stubbs, in remarking
of the English writing system's conservative development,

draws a conclusion essentially similar to that which can be

registered here concerning the problematic nature of the
language structure when used to explain a user's language

performance:
"The English writing system, even more than
most, is embedded in a powerful social and
technological network with enormously
complex interrelations, and therefore
enormous inertia against change. The
network includes: the attitudes of its
millions of users; educational systems
and libraries; the publishing trades with
the demands of machine printing; inter­
national communications and the role of
English as a world language; and the
relation between English and other
languages and writing systems. Any
change in the system would have enormous
attitudinal, institutional, technological,
and therefore, enormous repercussions..."
(1980: 71-72)
we have a formalized written language that is reflected
in our formalized, systematic dictionaries which mark what

can be considered standard (i.e. that which constitutes the

formal language structure). We also have our individual

systems of performance which do not necessarily complement

the structural system. Educators work to align students'

written language usage with that of the higher, more
"correct" and more politically powerful formal structure.

XII. The dictionary as an encapsulation of all knowledge

That teachers themselves are willing to send their

Page 182
students to the dictionary to resolve spelling and meaning
problems is an outright acknowledgement, if not of the
dictionary's omniscience, then of its accessibility to at
least a toehold of understanding anything ever humanly con­

ceived or experienced. This is comparable to how the

soldier, who was stationed in a foreign country where the
people spoke another language, answered the question of what
books he brought with him to read. "I only put my dictionary

in the duffel bag because it already has all the words that
writers've ever used in it. If I look at that, I'm reading

in effect whatever's been written."

While the above soldier may be chided for his simple-
minded appreciation of the contents of books, his imparting
of such depth of information to the dictionary does point up
similar naivete in certain teachers. It also reinvokes the
classic dictionary/encyclopedia debate over the proper amount

of information that should be in either and the degree to

which they should overlap. Most pertinent here is not how
much a dictionary should communicate for each lexical entry,

but rather how much a dictionary user needs to know to know a

word and additionally how much he expects to find in a

dictionary.
At the core of the distinction between the dictionary

and the encyclopedia lie the differing goals of each

reference work. From this very core issues the age-old
misinterpretation of the word being the thing and not merely

a representative symbol for it. As the Encyclopedia

Page 183
Britannica defines itself in opposition to the dictionary, "a
dictionary explains words, whereas an encyclopedia explains

things. . .[Encyclopedias] are summaries of extant

scholarships in forms comprehensible to their readers."
While the dictionary is a scholarly product and drawn in
accessibly cogent language, the lexicographer’s intention is
not ultimately concerned with whatever is known about a
lexical item, but importantly with what can be deduced from

that item’s linguistic use in native speakers' interactions.

The knowledge reflected in the encyclopedia is that of the
actual denotations of words as representative of things and

the knowledge presented in the dictionary is of the way words

differ from each other or rather, the way the objects that
they denote are perceived to belong to the same or different

classes.
From the same article earlier cited of Mufwene, he lends

some clarification to a proper distinction of these two types

of reference:
"encyclopedias help their users know more
about the universe (real or fictional) and
diverse activities of the humanity, but
they do not help them speak or use a
language, in fact the user of an encyclo­
pedia is supposed to be fluent in the
language already. Any dictionary would be
castigated for omitting to define what...
age, hair, and dumb [mean],...nor would
items such as here, there, right, left, he,
she, current, normal, hitherto, early, late
and countless others which are assumed By
some linguists to have only linguistic
meanings and no denotations and yet are
so commonly used in everyday verbal com­
munication. Encyclopedias do not care
to enter them,...since there is no or

Page 184
 little, encyclopedic information about
their denotations which in the opinion
of their compilers deserves as much
Interest as the denotations of furniture
or clothing." (1984: 5-6)

While Haiman details the arguable position that "dic­

tionaries are not in principle different from encyclopedias,"
(335) he writes from a narrow conception of word function

that does not realistically treat of the cataloguing role of

lexical items in encyclopedias, nor of their constraining

role in lexicography. The dictionary is encyclopedic to the

extent that the lexical information for an entry establishes

practical reference to a particular domain of discourse for

the word's use. Thus, the information concerning this

linguistic relationship of signs and their denotations

inevitably is encyclopedic to a limited degree.

in appearance then, lexicographical information may seem

to include all that is relevant to understanding the concrete

referent of any word. In actuality, this information is only

sufficient for one to know how and when to use the word in
appropriate contexts. The best laid dictionary definition
will not outfit the reader with anything more. Frequently it

so happens that the lexicographical Information will

inadvertently give the reader access to areas properly extra-
linguistic but this is more due to fortuitous overlap than to
deliberate intention. The problem for the naive consulter of
the dictionary is in his presumption that knowing a word's
meaning implies that he also thereby knows what constitutes
the physical or metaphysical reality of the object denoted,

Page 185
whereas the dictionary can only inform in the way the symbol
interrelates with other lexical symbols on the abstract level
of communication or any other language function.

XIII. Words as the heart of language

This is a double-edged criticism of conceptions of
language from average users of dictionaries and from the pro­
fessional language pundits— the linguists. A mighty, unfair

generalization, to be sure, yet basically at a realistic

level. Popularly, language consciously considered is
examinable at the levels of words. Words, of course, are

visualized as composed of letters and in fact seen this way

on the written or printed page. The power of chirography

"transliterates” the spatial dimension and words become

deictic outside their primal reality of sound and its
temporal constraints. So transformed, visible and often

synesthetically appreciated, words are what most people con­

ceive language to comprise. Their understanding of words is

buffeted by the many and variable sociocultural winds of

conformity. To pass beyond this understanding to get at the

nature of and the reasons for the conformity of the language

both historically and contemporarily, a professional's

critical analysis is called for.

Yet oddly enough, language teachers and linguists re­

emphasize consideration of the lexicon, concentrating on

phonetic, morphologic and syntactic aspects of the language.

Such concentration devalues the fundamental word. The author

Page 186
of a Spanish textbook for beginning learners advises, "If you
are a typical foreign-language student. . .you probably tend

to worry a great deal about vocabulary. Please don't,

because It is the least important aspect of your study. . ."
(Dalbor, xxvi. Cited In Bolinger, 1973: 8) But few students
are ever relieved by this. While an initial concentration

on other aspects of language is likely most beneficial in

establishing a working familiarity for the student, as
Bolinger goes on to write, "the brute mastery of hundreds of

terms for not quite familiar segmentations of reality as it

is seen by people in a culture different from their own

[makes] in the long run [for] the heaviest investment. . . in

words." {8).
Linguistically, greater attention is given the sentence
and its underlying structure, to which is lastly fitted with
appropriate selections from the lexicon. This latter has

long been lightly considered and little understood. The

world of words, "clamorous and messy," was condescendingly

left "to popular wordsmiths and other disorganized people
such as lexicographers." (Bolinger, 8-9) But rather than
grammar being a grand structure onto which words are fixed,
it should be recognized as that which is organized around

words— serving words. In transformational grammar and

generative semantics, treatment of the lexicon has been
subjugated to other, often syntatic, levels of analysis.
Various solutions of synonymy and homonymy enter from outside
the lexicon instead of from within. Take Bolinger's classic

Page 187
example of a supposed transformational relationship: the
sentence "John is easy to please" is thought to be a trans­
formation of a deep structure of something like "It is easy

to please John." Bolinger notes,

For this to work properly, we have to be
able to "raise" John in any such under­
lying structure, for instance It is
imperative to please John or It would be
wise to help John. But *John~~Is imperative
to please cannot be said at all- and John
would b~e~wise to help means something dif­
ferent. It turns out that the set of
adjectives that can be used in the
construction John is easy to please is
precisely the set wEose meanings permit
them to modify John in the simple
sentence. John Is”"easy: I couldn't be
bothered to try to please John because
he was too easy— not enough of a challenge.
TTol-------------------------------------------------------

Bolinger proposes no new theoretical framework of

analysis for linguists, just a procedure for sampling the
lexicon as lexicographers do, but with a fullness and

subtlety that is denied them by commercial exigency. With

such an approach, linguists will learn to know what questions
to ask and how to judge the answers. He disdains any who

would regard a completely lexicographic procedure as simply

taxonomic and reminds them that "meanings are not visible,

tangible, or ponderable. Every time the lexicographer pro­

poses a meaning he propounds a theory. Not a global one, but

good enough for a beginning, and the safest way to conduct an

exploration." (11)

Page 188
IV. Conclusion
There remains, then, the general conception of language

for users of dictionaries that is an inadvertent product, and

not all that fallacious, of literacy, education and the

abstraction of written language. In the West, information
about language--about words, can be gained from dictionaries.
While literacy is the key to this storehouse of knowledge,
the bits of written communication that are codified in lexi­

cographical format are metalinguistically static. This is

what happens when language is frozen by writing.

The acquisition of literacy has generally been conceived

in America, at least, as the beginning of real economic

progress, so construed, the written word has been elevated
and the dictionary has evolved as the keeper of the word, or

more clearly, the keeper of the language. For the dictionary

user, because the language's decodification has been largely

an educational process, ideas of correctness and incorrect­

ness come to inhere in written words. The dictionary becomes

the authoritarian arbiter of right and wrong, good and bad.

The brouhaha at the reception of the Webster's Third Inter­

national Dictionary offers ample proof of this conception,

(see Sledd and Ebbitts, 1962 for a wide-ranging overview of

the turmoil)
The dictionary brings to the user a perspective on
language that is atomized. This atomization applies both to

the macrostructure of the word ordering and the micro­

structure of the entries through which the form, function and

Page 189
content have become discrete entities. The autonomy o£
lexical units remains intact by written language constraints.

The meaning of lexical units is understood by users, in

effect, as part of a static model of a complete language

system. The Implications for dictionary users and their

conception of language unfold in meaning being contained
within the word or phrase irrespective of the language user.

(See Gates, 1977, for meanings tied to multi-word lexical

units) Language and, by extension, knowledge, become matters

of storage and not activity. Though modern lexicographers do

not overtly follow this view, there remains a very real need
to determine acceptable standards of literacy before they can

begin their selection of entries. More frequently now,

dictionary-makers see the language as conditioned by its
social functions and the choice of entries is determined by
frequency tables and user needs rather than by literary whim.

Acknowledging that the dictionary ca be seen as a

literate practice and that this literate practice derives
from a certain social structure, one can see how the

influential social registers can provide the prevailing

abstract level ideologically for the analysis and expression

of the lexical world. On a concrete level, dictionaries and

their compilers contribute greatly to the process of

standardization by favoring a variety of language used by the

professional class (the variety left unmarked by usage

labels).

Page 190
 Some effort has been expended in modern lexicographic

practice to go beyond the constraints attaching to a codi­

fication of the standard written language. Beyond the

recognition that all language is embedded in some context,

lexicographers are hard-pressed by their very medium to

encode the activity that is also a hallmark, of language.
There is no generally agreed framework for studying, classi­

fying and describing language varieties and the external

situational contexts of communicative activity that shape the

internal structure of the message. (See Bejoint, 1979, for

his ideas concerning the use of informants in lexicographical

work) A pragmatic approach to language in context requires

the classification and description of not only written but

also spoken text samples. Lexical items do not function in

isolation but have a different status according to which part

of a discourse they are found in.

Page 191
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Page 195
 VITA

Vincent David Regan received the B.A. degree in the

French language and literature from Rider College,
Lawrenceville, New Jersey in May of 1975. Prior to his
senior year there, he attended (1973-74) the University de
Besanyorj in Besancon, France at the Centre de Linguistique
Appliquee. Shortly after graduating from Rider College, he
worked a year and a half as a reviser and proofreader for the
Princeton University Press of Princeton, New Jersey. He left
the Press to become an editor of reference works for Laurence
Urdang, Inc. of Essex, Connecticut. At L. U. I., Regan
helped revise the Synonym Finder, originally published by the
Rodale Press in 1958. He afterwards worked on the compiling
team for a comprehensive guide to allusions, Allusions:
Cultural, Literary, Biblical and Historical— A~Thematic
Dictionary.
He attended at this juncture the University of Notre
Dame in the fall of 1979, pursuing the M.A. in English
Language and Linguistics (completed 1981). From Notre Dame,
he continued study for the doctoral degree at Indiana
University in Bloomington, Indiana. After completing the
coursework for the degree, he took up the teaching of English
and linguistics at West Virginia state College in Institute,
West Virginia. While there and composing his dissertation,
Regan wrote numerous linguistic and lexicographical papers
for conference presentations and symposia. Several have been
published, notably in the Marshall University Bulletin of the
W. V. Association of College English Teachers, the Mid-
America Linguistics Conference Proceedings and in
Dictionaries, the journal of the Dictionary Society of North
America.
Regan is married to the former Elisabeth Melville and
they have three daughters, Alison, Teresa and Katherine.
They presently live in St. Albans, West Virginia.