The History And Principles Of Lexicography

The history of the dictionary is inseparable from the history of literacy itself, as human communities have always needed tools to preserve, standardise, and transmit the meanings of words across time and social contexts. Lexicography is separated into two types: practical lexicography is the ability of accumulating, writing, and editing dictionaries, while theoretical lexicography, also identified as metalexicography, is the study or description of the vocabulary of a particular language and the meaning that associates certain words to others in a dictionary. Theoretical lexicography is particularly concerned with developing theories concerning the structural and semantic associations among words in the dictionary, involving theoretical analysis of the lexicon.

To gain a better understanding of lexicography, we should be familiar with lexicons. A lexicon is an expression used in linguistics to point out the archive of lexemes. Lexemes are abstract, smallest components in a language that connect interrelated forms of a word together. Lexemes, then, make up a lexicon, which is the compilation of word meanings in a specified language. In a dictionary, the lexemes, sometimes loosely referred to as word stems, are given first and followed by variations of the base word. The lexicon also deals with semantics, a field of linguistics concerned with meaning. In addition to providing data on the morphology and semantics of a lexeme, the dictionary also offers structural information concerning the origin of the word and chronological information about the development of the word into its present-day form, which is recognised as etymology.

Lexicology took form to meet the demands of many diverse branches of applied linguistics. Its significance is that it assists in motivating a systematic approach to the facts of vocabulary and an organised judgment of both the foreign and native language. It is mainly helpful in building up the learner’s terminology by a useful selection, grouping, and study of new words.

The English Dictionary has not been created by a single person and not in one age; it has gradually developed through the centuries. In the seventh and eighth centuries, Latin was the only language of books in Western Europe and education in Latin was the doorway to all knowledge. Right about that time, a carrier of a Latin book came across difficult words which were not well known in Latin vocabulary; upon discovering the meanings, he used to write them over the original text in easier Latin or a word in his own dialect. A word written in such a manner is called a “gloss.” Many examples of glosses have been found in old Latin texts. An assortment of glosses which was copied and put together into a single list comprised a Glossarium or Glossary; it was the distant forerunner of the seventeenth-century “Table Alphabetical” or “Expositor of Hard Words.”

The Vocabulary and the Glossary satisfied alike offices and so they were frequently united. When these documents were copied and re-copied, it was observed that their effectiveness could be improved by putting the words and phrases into alphabetical order. All the words beginning with A were extracted, then with B and so on; this is known as “first letter” order. A later scribe then selected the A words that began with Aa, Ab, and so on, developing what is known as second-letter order.

All these stages can be noticed in four of the earliest glossaries of English origin: the Leiden, the Epinal, the Erfurt, and the Corpus. The Leiden Glossary corresponds to the initial phase of such a work. The Epinal Glossary has sophisticated to first-letter order. The third stage is characterised by the Corpus Glossary, where the alphabetical arrangement reaches second-letter order. The Leiden was created between 600 and 700 A.D. It is noteworthy that those ancient glossaries and vocabularies not only became fuller and more systematic over time but also more English. At first, glosses were used to explain hard Latin words by easier Latin words; in the Corpus Glossary and the glossaries that follow, the Latin explanations have become more eradicated and replaced by English ones. During the sixteenth century, many important Latin-English and English-Latin vocabularies and dictionaries were accumulated and published. In 1747, five or six London booksellers contracted with Samuel Johnson to create a preferred standard dictionary. From the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the lexicographical superiority of Johnson’s Dictionary was undoubted. Noah Webster believed that America must have a dictionary of its own form of English. Dr. Charles Richardson believed that definitions are unnecessary in a dictionary and that quotations alone are enough.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Dr. Trench, then Dean of Westminster, called upon the Philological Society to take on the compilation of resources to complete the work already done by Bailey, Johnson, Todd, Webster, Richardson, and others, and to prepare a supplement to all the dictionaries which must catalogue all absent words and senses. From this initiative, the movement started which concluded in the preparation of the Oxford English Dictionary, “A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, founded mainly on the materials collected by the Philological Society.” Since then several large dictionaries have been compiled and published across the world.

What is the difference between a dictionary and an encyclopaedia?

The main differences between a dictionary and an encyclopaedia are that a dictionary makes definitions of words available, arranged alphabetically, giving information on how to pronounce the word and providing lexical information. Whereas an encyclopaedia is a set of books that contain articles on different subjects in alphabetical order, providing detailed information on topics rather than on words themselves.

If we look at an example of the word “table”: the dictionary gives us different meanings of this word with sentences, while the encyclopaedia gives a range of articles related to the specific word with detailed information and even pictures.

What jobs should dictionaries do?

The following are some of the main jobs that dictionaries do: look up the meaning of an English word; find the English translation of a word in your language; check the spelling of a word; check the plural of a noun or past tense of a verb; find out other grammatical information about a word; find the synonym or antonym of a word; look up the collocations of a word; check the part of speech of a word; find out how to say a word; find out about the register of a word; and find examples of the use of a word in natural language.

Dictionaries are used by people of different professions. Teachers, students, English learners, people learning another language, and writers all benefit from different features of dictionary use. For students writing essays, a thesaurus is a great tool since teachers prefer varied vocabulary. For English learners, a dictionary can extend a limited vocabulary and provide examples of word usage in sentences. For writers, dictionaries ensure correct spelling and assist in vocabulary choice.

Consider more recent developments in modelling lexical meaning such as network representations.

A Data-graphical Model of the Linguistic Sign: the triangle is the vital graphical formula of the sign. The semantic triangle is the first graphic model of the sign, imitating the proposition acknowledged since the Middle Ages that the form of a linguistic expression (Symbol) denotes the “thing” (Referent) by virtue of “understanding” (Thought). The British linguist John Lyons in his model articulated the nature of the word more accurately as a double-sided entity, associating the meaning of a word with the concept linked to the form of the word in the minds of the speakers, thus continuing the medieval tradition.

The value of this idea is that the meaning of a word is formed as an autonomous unit belonging to the system, and is not identified either with concept or with a thing (Referent). Ferdinand de Saussure, the eminent twentieth-century Swiss linguist, confirmed the sign character of language in his theory. For Saussure, the linguistic sign is “the signifier.” In the model by Novikov, the triangle is replaced by a trapezoid and distinguishes the scientific notion of an object and the lexical meaning of a word which calls this object. Lexical meaning comprises different characteristics including significative meaning, structural meaning (syntagmatic and paradigmatic), emotive meaning, and denotative meaning.

As Atkins and Rundell (2008) demonstrate in their comprehensive study of practical lexicography, the processes of dictionary-making have been transformed in the digital age, with corpus linguistics providing lexicographers with access to far larger and more varied samples of actual language use than any previous generation of editors could access. For students of English language and linguistics, understanding the history and principles of lexicography illuminates not only how dictionaries are made but why the choices made by dictionary editors, from which words to include to how definitions are worded, always reflect particular assumptions about language, usage, and authority.

References

Atkins, B. T. S., & Rundell, M. (2008). The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511842818

Landau, S. I. (2001). Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511842849

Hartmann, R. R. K., & James, G. (1998). Dictionary of Lexicography. Routledge.

Jackson, H. (2002). Lexicography: An Introduction. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203471562