SEMANTIC AND THE DICTIONARY

A language such as English contains a very large number of lexical items and it is the
function of a dictionary to list these items, and to give any necessary information (phonological,
syntactic, semantic , stylistic, etc.) about the way they fit into the language system. The body of
information given about one item may be called a lexical entry', and it is probably true that the
most important part of a lexical entry, as far as the everyday user of dictionaries is concerned, is
the semantic part of it, i.c. the definition.one important fact that is sometimes overlooked in the
discussion of dictionaries: that dictionaries are open-ended, and are continually being adapted to
new requirements by the addition of new lexical entries. This 'creative or 'generative' principle of
dictionaries can be accounted for by means of LEXICAL RULES, amongst which are rules of
meaning transfer (e.g. rules which enable us to use words in new metaphorical senses). Yet such
lexical rules are only partially productive, in the sense that they apply only to certain of the cases
to which in theory they are applicable; hence the earlier characterization of the dictionary as the
store of the particular (i.c. ungeneralizable) facts about a language' remains largely valid.

A. Practical Dictionaries

The preceding paragraph suffers from an unfortunate ambiguity which attends the use of
the term dictionary as of the term grammar. In one sense. a dictionary is a reference book on the
living-room or library shelf: in another sense, it is the inbuilt dictionary' which every one of us
carries around as part of his mental equipment as a speaker of a language. As this book's central
purpose is to explore the notion of 'semantic competence (see p. 6 and clsewhere), it is the
dictionary in this second sense (which we may distinguish by the term LEXICON) that is the
present concern.

“Wolf: Erect-eared straight-tailed harsh-furred tawny-grey wild gre- garious carnivorous

quadruped allied to dog preying on sheep etc. or combining in packs to hunt larger animals
(Concise Oxford Dictionary)”

On more practical grounds, such definitions as the above may be criticized because a
number of words in the definition (gregarious and carmivorous, for instance) are far less familiar
to the ordinary user of English than the word wolf itself. But we should not necessarily blame the
lexicographer for embroidering on the bare stuff of meaning in this way. He might justifiably
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retort: How, then, would you define wolf: and certainly if the view of the meanings of such
words on p. 84 is accepted, one could do little more, in a dictionary which aimed to presen
semantic realities, than define the word as 'an animal of the species "wolf. Perhaps a picture of
the animal would come closest to the spirit of representing the category signified by the single
atomic feature §SPECIES.

B. The Lexicon (or 'theoretical' dictionary)

simplified model (or theoretical plan) of the lexicon of the English language, viewed as part of
the competence of the native speaker of English. The lexicon will be considered as an unordered
list or set of lexical entries. A lexical entry, in turn, will be considered as a combination of three
specifications: a morphological specification (giving the form of the word in terms of stems and
affixes); a syntactic specification (classifying the word in terms of its distributional potential
within sentences); and a semantic specification (or definition).

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