Wierzbicka's Theory and the Practice of Lexicography

Sidney I. Landau

Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, Number

14, 1992/93, pp. 113-119 (Article)

Published by Dictionary Society of North America

DOI: 10.1353/dic.1992.0007

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dic/summary/v014/14.landau.html

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 Wierzbicka's Theory and the Practice of
Lexicography

Sidney I. Landau

Anna Wierzbicka's method in "What Are the Uses of Theo-

retical Lexicography?" is impeccably logical and brilliantly executed,
with fine sensitivity to the pragmatic interactions that contribute
much to meaning but that do not, in my view, define it. Ironically, her
defining method is most likely to influence ESL dictionaries, less
likely (for entirely practical reasons) to influence children's dictionar-
ies, and least likely of all to have any effect on commercial adult dic-
tionaries such as college dictionaries. This is ironic because her
method is not didactic but descriptive. She does not argue, so far as I
know, that her method of defining is the best way to teach vocabulary
or to promote a better understanding of meaning, but that it is simply
the only way to define truly and accurately, that is to say, in a descrip-
tively faithful way. But ESL and children's dictionaries are pedagog-
ical as well as descriptive. They also pay more attention to encoding
than do college dictionaries, which are concerned mainly with decod-
ing, and it is in the encoding function that Wierzbicka's method has
its chief potential to influence practical lexicography.
Although I admire the rigor of Wierzbicka's argument and her
discipline in demonstrating how it works in practice, her insistence on
the "invariant concept" seems to me chiefly an article of faith born
of her irritation over the excessive use of polysemy by many diction-
aries. One can agree, as I do, that dictionaries often rely too heavily
on polysemy and can still have doubts about the value of the invariant
concept. This, of course, is a very old idea, one that Home Tooke pro-
mulgated in the 18th century and that has been adopted in modern
dress by contemporary scholars (see Ruhl 1989), and while Wierzbic-
ka's invariant concept is less compulsively monosemic than that of the
others, the arguments for such unities seem to ignore the stubborn
diversity of actual usage.
114Sidney I. Landau

Reading her paper, one might suppose that her method was
entirely intuitive. In fact, as one realizes from Wierzbicka's work (es-
pecially 1985, 1987), she relies on citational evidence to support her
definitions. However, the citations are used to confirm the truth value
of folk definitions rather than as evidence from which to induce def-
initions. This is rather like a doctor who forms a diagnosis and then
tries to find symptoms to support it. Folk definitions so created are
models for creating new uses, and are thus excellent pedagogical aids
for foreign learners, who will not be insulted by the simple and me-
thodical iteration of short, declarative statements; but they will be of
littíe value in disambiguating closely related uses in subtíy varying con-
texts, a purpose often motivating native speakers to use a dictionary.
Furthermore, I must announce resolutely (blast of trumpets,
please) that every word is definable, pace Wierzbicka, Arnauld, and
whomever else she wants to quote. I am sorry to try her patience with
this obstinate refusal to witness the Truth, and I acknowledge readily
that every definition may not please Wierzbicka and that some circu-
larity will therefore be inevitable, although not necessarily com-
pressed in such tight circles as she has demonstrated by examining a
1959 "Webster's" dictionary published by Fawcett (a mass-market pa-
perback?) and the shortest of Oxford's line of dictionaries, the Oxford
Paperback Dictionary (OPD), which, with all due respect to Oxford,
hardly represent lexicography at its best. Mass-market paperbacks
like Fawcett's are generally prepared by makeshift free-lance teams
hired to meet impossible deadlines and required to abridge the par-
ent work (which may be an old, inferior, out-of-copyright dictionary)
to a ridiculously short compass in order to price the book competi-
tively. As Atkins points out in her "Theoretical Lexicography and Its
Relation to Dictionary-making," pricing often determines many other
lexicographic policies, and nowhere is this more critical than in mass-
market dictionaries. To take editors of such books to task for not
being properly concerned with the truth is rather like criticizing Mc-
Donald's kitchen workers for being unconcerned about the beauty of
a Big Mac. These editors are working for a living. Their jobs are at
risk if they do not meet the deadlines imposed on them. Call them
hacks, unprincipled, careless; but there is a demand for products on
a variety of levels, for plastic flatware as well as silver, and it is idle to
insist that only silver will do or that the many who work diligendy to
produce cheap merchandise have no vision and no principles. They
cannot afford such luxuries. The difference between them and those
who work on commercial dictionaries of higher quality is a matter of
degree, not of kind.
 Wierzbicka's Theory and the Practice of Lexicography115

Drawing by Jonik; © 1991 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

So if we are to examine the record of lexicographical quality, at

least let us agree to examine works that pretend to do more than sell
at less than $4.00 to generate annual revenue of $2 million or what-
ever. Let us look at W3 or the leading American college dictionaries
or their British counterparts and see whether they are guilty of the
flagrant circularities that Wierzbicka shows. Ultimately, as Wierzbicka
rightly observes, circularity is unavoidable if every word is defined,
but circularity—if the circle is wide enough—need not be an imped-
iment to comprehension.
The question of defining very basic words such as good and bad
is another issue, and although Wierzbicka is right that these are in a
general way intuitively clear, is it enough to rely in a general way on
such concepts to define other words that are used in a variety of ways,
for example, ways in which good is used variously and bad is used var-
iously? Badfood, a bad decision, and a bad man each refer to different
senses even though all share the negative or aversive quality that
Wierzbicka would call the invariant concept. Maybe the invariant
concept is enough to enable a foreign learner to make a question or
comment understood—the encoding function—but is it enough to
116Sidney I. Landau

distinguish between, say, mistake, blunder, lapse, wrong, and sin? Will
good and bad and other undefined words in our dictionary's metalan-
guage be sufficient to define conspectus, tergiversation, contextualize,
bankruptcy, redemption, or, for that matter, apples and oranges?
If once we allow that not all words are definable, where do we
draw the line on undefinability? In Wierzbicka (1987), an undefined
metalanguage of 188 words was used to define a lexicon of 270 verbs;
that is, 69.6% of the vocabulary comprising the dictionary is unde-
fined. The metalanguage includes the following words: important, in-
stitution, Christ, imagine, position, perceive, willing, understand, separate,
possible, number, untrue, contact, God, future. How many more might be
needed to define, say, the 90,000 or so main entries of the typical col-
lege dictionary? Why are these words considered nondefinable and
not others of equivalent frequency? Moreover, doesn't the choice of
words that need not be defined suggest a particular cultural back-
ground that may not be shared by everybody? It is precisely to
avoid—or at least minimize—the bias that is an inevitable conse-
quence of relying primarily on intuition that the better dictionaries
rely on corpora for determining definition. In many actual contexts as
revealed by the study of corpora, intuition, as Patrick Hanks (1990)
points out, is often not to be trusted.
The reason Wierzbicka's method is not likely to be adopted by
any commercial dictionary for the native speaker is that most adult
users would find her method extremely cumbersome, time-consuming,
and (wrongly) juvenile. Most users do not want to spend much time
consulting a dictionary for a definition; they regard it as a source for
quick reference and do not have the patience to read front-matter ex-
planations of the defining rationale, much less appreciate the decep-
tive simplicity of Wierzbicka's method, which is simple in syntax but
far from simple in the demands it places on the reader to follow the
course of argument. It is, therefore, not just the extravagant use of
space (which Wierzbicka acknowledges) that makes her method of
doubtful usefulness in such dictionaries but the effort it requires of
the user. On the other hand, I doubt that most dictionary users would
be satisfied by a definition of horse that read "a kind of animal called
horse," however satisfying that might be to a theoretical lexicographer.
Not only does her method place great demands on the user,
but it would also place impossible demands on a working team of de-
finers. Dictionaries take long enough as it is; if we were to adopt her
method, how would we find whole teams of definers endowed with
Wierzbicka's logical and intuitive language skills to compile the work,
 Wierzbicka's Theory and the Practice of Lexicography117

and if we did, how long would it take? On the other hand, if we were
to rely on a corpus rather than intuition to determine the invariant
concept of each word, wouldn't we first have to do exactly what lex-
icographers traditionally do now, but do it with a far greater number
of citations? In short, wouldn't we have to distinguish between many
different closely—or not so closely—allied senses to determine
whether polysemy or homonymy existed, and, if the former, how
closely linked the various senses were? To provide a basis for the uni-
fying concept that Wierzbicka argues exists, we would have to exam-
ine an exponentially greater number of citations. Now we need only
enough citations for each putative sense to disambiguate it from
other senses, but in her method, we would need enough to show the
commonality between one sense and each of the others, a common-
ality that must be reduced to the explicit pragmatic interactions be-
tween people that constitute her defining style. That will not be easy
to demonstrate, and would require the collection of a vast number of
citations for each word, thus greatly prolonging the time required to
analyze each word before fashioning its definition.
Nevertheless, Wierzbicka's achievement is impressive and does
have implications for the practicing lexicographer. She has not only
elaborated a theory but acted upon it to show how it works.
Wierzbicka (1987, 13—14) refers to my exemplification of W9's scien-
tific definition offeather as a necessary evil and claims to have shown
that technical concepts can be defined without recourse to esoteric
scientific language. She is true to her promise, and I can only admire
the ingenuity of her method. Defining technically difficult concepts
in simple terms would be revolutionary but ought seriously to be con-
sidered by commercial lexicographers. Although I agree with Atkins
that dictionaries will be available mainly in book form, an electronic
dictionary could offer the user both the folk definition and a scien-
tifically rigorous definition for every scientific or technical entry. In
fact, it could offer more than two alternatives. There could also be a
more technical, encyclopedic definition for those desiring still more
information. The user could select a default definition depending on
his or her preference. In this connection, Wierzbicka draws too sharp
a line between dictionaries and encyclopedias. For her to say blithely
that if people desire encyclopedic information they should look in
their encyclopedias ignores the long tradition in American lexicogra-
phy of providing a considerable amount of encyclopedic information.
Many dictionary users do not draw a sharp distinction between dic-
tionaries and encyclopedias. (Every lexicographer has had the expe-
118Sidney I. Landau

rience of unexpectedly encountering old friends who greet one by

saying, "Oh, how's the—uh—encyclopedia coming along?") Many
people do not own an encyclopedia; they expect their dictionary to
give them more than linguistic information, and American dictionar-
ies must for competitive reasons meet their expectations.
Since Wierzbicka has been critical of traditional definitions,
she should not be spared equal scrutiny. Consider her definition of
tempt:
X tempted Y to do Z. =
(a)X wanted Y to do Z
(b)Y thought something like this:
(c)if I do Z it will be bad
(d)because of this, I don't want to do it
(e)X knew this
(f) because of this, X said to Y something like this:
(g)if you do it, something very good will happen to you
(h)you will feel something very good because of this
(i)X thought something like this:
(j)it can happen that Y will do it because of this
(k)X wanted this
Surely (a) "X wanted Y to do Z" should follow (e). Although X may
want this at the same time Y thinks that doing something will be bad,
the disjunction between X's thoughts and Y's makes the definition
hard to follow. This illustrates another problem with her method: al-
most all her definitions are based on simple theoretical situations be-
tween people, but a high percentage of actual usage would show that
these verbs are routinely used to describe many different complex re-
lationships between organizations, governments, industries, and in-
deed between ideas, methods, and suppositions. How would her
definition work for "Her dream tempted her to rethink her plans?"
Can a dream want someone to do something?
In drawing a distinction between rebuking and reprimanding,
Wierzbicka (1987, 21) says that "neither rebuking nor reprimanding can
be done gently" [her italics]. I doubt that this is true. I would wager
that a computer search would turn up many examples of "gende rep-
rimands" and "gentle rebukes." Wierzbicka's view of meaning varia-
tions is too limited. A more accurate representation of the complexity
of usages would, of course, make her method far more difficult to use.
I have less to say about Atkins's paper because as a descriptive
model I think it is accurate and because she admits quite honestly to
 Wierzbicka's Theory and the Practice of Lexicography119

the limitations of our craft, for example, that there is never enough
time to do all the computer checks that are theoretically possible. We
work in a complex field resistant to simple solutions, but I agree
with Atkins that we must be receptive to the courageous attempts of
some theoretical linguists to develop new and better defining meth-
ods. Atkins concludes, as practicing lexicographers usually do, with a
comment about the qualities of a good definer.
Allen Reddick (1990, 88) says of Samuel Johnson:
By the time of the publication of the Dictionary, he had grown
into his own voice, with his own authority; and ironically the
knowledge of his abilities and accomplishments made him less
confident of the inexact and incomplete science of lexicog-
raphy.
Many other lexicographers have had the same experience.

References

Hanks, Patrick. 1990. "Evidence and Intuition in Lexicography." In Meaning and

Lexicography, ed.Jerzy Tomaszczyk and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Reddick, Allen. 1990. The Making ofJohnson's Dictionary, 1746-1773. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP.

Ruhl, Charles. 1989. On Monosemy: A Study in Linguistic Semantics. Albany, New

York: State University of New York.

Wierzbicka, Anna. 1985. Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis. Ann Arbor: Karoma.

--------- . 1987. English Speech Act Verbs: A Semantic Dictionary. Sydney: Academic
Press.