lexicography

1) Area of applied linguistics that focuses on

Compilation of
Description of types of relations found
dictionaries.
in the lexicon.
Practical lexicography
Theoretical lexicography

2) Historians

First dictionaries traced back to explanation of difficult

Latin words Middle Ages these glosses evolved into glossaries

Teaching Transmission of
knowledge

3) Many perceive dictionaries as authoritative records of how people ought to use

language but modern lexicography is more concerned with a descriptive approach.
4) a) In 1604, Robert Cawdrey published his A Table Alphabetical and is usually
considered as the first printed monolingual English dictionary .
b) In 1755, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language is said to be the
first modern and innovative dictionary of English.
He was aware of the
Inflectinal and need to establish clear
derivational criteria for selecting
Reflected the need for morphology words to be included
a prescriptive and in dictionaries or for
normative authority In 1747,he addressed distinguishing
which would serve to to Lord Chesterfield between general
establish a standard of his “Plan of a language and
correctness dictionary of the specialized
English Language” pronunciation terminology.
in which he
discussed

etymology
 Murray’s Oxford English Dictionary
5) Monument of English lexicography

Project started
in 1879 Final version
was in 1928 Today

The OED includes

around 300,000
To produce a 4- entries defining
volume dictionary over half a million
recording the lexical items
history of English
First supplement
was in 1933

Used nearly 2000 000 citation forms Many supplements were

to track the genesis and evolution of published in the 20th century
lexical items

The advent of learners’ dictionaries

6) The history of monolingual learners’ dictionaries can be traced back to the

contribution of

A.S. Hornby Michael West H.E. Palmer

Created the so-called “vocabulary control movement “

a) Harold Palmer interested in identifying the set of words which speakers use
most frequently to communicate after realizing that a high level of natural
communication could be achieved by using a vocabulary of around 1000 words, he
worked with

b) A.S. Hornby to produce Thousand-Word English, in 1938 initially 900 words.

c) Michael West took the vocabulary control idea to develop a limited vocabulary

of about 1,500 words which he used to edit his New Method English Dictionary (1935)

d) The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (first ed. 1978) followed this
tradition by using controlled vocabulary of about 2000 words.
e) More recently, the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2007) uses
a limited vocabulary of about 2,500 words.
The list of words that are granted entry status is smaller than the native –speaker
dictionary and rare and highly technical words are not included in learners’
dictionaries.

How are words defined in a learner’s dictionary? A person who / to make

or become / cause to .

Combining dictionaries and grammars

1) Palmer was the first to have experimented with various systems for accounting for
verbal valency( the nature and number of complements a verb can take).
2) In 1938,he published his Grammar of English Words

In this dictionary, he identified each verb pattern by means of a number code

He influenced Hornby in the 1930s.Took over this idea of using verb-pattern

schemes in his Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (1942). In 1952, it

became the Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English.

3) Longman Dictionary of Current English (LDOCE) included , in its first edition of

1978, (1) Pronunciation, (2) Syllable division, (3) Compounds, (4) Irregular
inflections , it also proposed a systematic organization of grammatical categories and
codes.
Lumping vs splitting

Considering two slightly different When the lexicographer separates

patterns of usage as a single meaning slightly different patterns of usage
into distinct meanings
 Lumping shorten (v) to make or become short or shorter.

splitting addle (v) [T1; 10] a: to cause (an egg) to go bad

b: (of an egg) to go bad

Dictionaries contain only “meaning potentials” potential contributions to the meanings

of texts and conversations in which the word is used and activated by the speaker who uses
them ( Hanks 2000)

Because of the meaning potential that dictionaries contain, it is said that meanings blur into
one another. That’s why lexicographers very often rely on corpus linguistics to solve this
problem.

Lexicography and corpus linguistics

In the 1970s and the 1980s, John Sinclair, from the University of Birmingham, carried out a
research leading to the publication of the COBUILD (Collins Birmingham University
International Language Data-base.). The first edition of Cobuild revolutionized the field of
dictionary-making, to such an extent that all dictionaries nowadays claim to be corpus-based,
whose description of English vocabulary is claimed to be based upon “natural” or “real” data.
BUT

Lexicographers of the pre-corpus era Modern Lexicographers

1) Record their findings on slips of paper. 1) Modern concordancers enable

2) Were concerned with rare phenomena them to examine the right and
and weird contexts and combinations. left contexts of a given word.
3) Frequently failed to record the prototypical 2) 1above is made possible with
uses of a word. thousands of KWIC lines.
4) Usually included citations from well-respe- 3) KWIC stand for = Key-Word
cted literary texts only. In Context.
5) Had to rely on their own reading program 4) KWIC lines identify, say, the
and their encyclopedic skills. typical preposition used with a
given verb or adjective.
5) Reveal collocational preferences
6) Colligation preferences= being
seen as a midway relation
between grammar and collocation