English lexicography through the ages. A case study based on four dictionary entries

English lexicography through the ages. A case study based on four dictionary entries
Author: Michael Barkas
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 30
Release: 2017-01-13
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 3668379750

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Bonn, course: English Words: Structure, History and Usage, language: English, abstract: The history of the English lexicography offers through its numerous works that have survived up to our days a great opportunity to observe not only the semantic development of words, but also their layout in a page, from their fonts' styles and sizes to the structure of their meanings and the later acquisition symbols and abbreviations. Online availability of historical dictionaries enables us to study comparatively and diachronically the curriculum vitae of words, through which we can reconstruct a morpho-semantic overview that links past with present usages and meanings including their semantic development (e.g. polysemy, shifted meanings etc.), spelling variations, etymological suggestions and other valuable pieces of information. In many cases, due to the scientific achievements and rapid changes that occur in the human societies, it is possible to observe how social and cultural changes may have been captured within a particular definition or an etymological explanation. The current study focuses on the analysis of four dictionary entries. How do the meanings of the selected words evolve semantically and what does each lexicographer offer to the reader as we approach modern times? Due to the restricted length available for this paper, the early seventeenth century has been set as starting point for this work; more precisely Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall (1604), a most well-known work regarded today as the first monolingual English dictionary. A total of ten important dictionaries up to the digital OED will be used. The aim is to demonstrate through a comparative approach what semantic changes have taken place throughout the definitions, what has survived or become obsolete over time and what is the semantic status of today's definitions within the selected headwords.

Broadening Perspectives in the History of Dictionaries and Word Studies

Broadening Perspectives in the History of Dictionaries and Word Studies
Author: Hans Van de Velde
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2021-10-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1527576604

This volume brings together fifteen articles exploring the linguistic and literary foundations of lexicography and lexicology. Topics explored here include a discussion of the relationships between lexicography and ideology in China; Frisian legal language and the Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch; the history and lexicography of Faroese; Wortgeschichte digital and its relation to Grimmian tradition; the linguistic history of phonetically imitative words; and studies of Croatian, Czech, English, Greek, and Turkish historical dictionaries. The book also presents a digital and textual study on the status of eponyms across the history of the Royal Society, as well as a study of German paronym dictionaries, a modern history of bilingual Russian-Tajik terminological dictionaries, and a historical overview of the lexicography of Frisian. The research findings and close readings by expert practitioners and historians of dictionaries and word studies found in the pages of this volume continue to broaden critical perspectives upon the study of manuscripts and print artifacts; dictionaries and standard varieties; biographies; bibliography and text analyses; dictionary production; and corpus and digital analyses.

Word by Word

Word by Word
Author: Kory Stamper
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2018-03-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 110197026X

“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.” With wit and irreverence, lexicographer Kory Stamper cracks open the obsessive world of dictionary writing, from the agonizing decisions about what to define and how to do it to the knotty questions of ever-changing word usage. Filled with fun facts—for example, the first documented usage of “OMG” was in a letter to Winston Churchill—and Stamper’s own stories from the linguistic front lines (including how she became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist, despite loathing the word), Word by Word is an endlessly entertaining look at the wonderful complexities and eccentricities of the English language.

Dictionary of Lexicography

Dictionary of Lexicography
Author: R. R. K. Hartmann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2002-01-04
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1134768281

Dictionaries are among the most frequently consulted books, yet we know remarkably little about them. Who makes them? Where do they come from? What do they offer? How can we evaluate them? The Dictionary of Lexicography provides answers to all these questions and addresses a wide range of issues: * the traditions of dictionary-making * the different types of dictionaries and other reference works (such as thesaurus, encyclopedia, atlas and telephone directory) * the principles and concerns of lexicographers and other reference professionals * the standards of dictionary criticism and dictionary use. It is both a professional handbook and an easy-to-use reference work. This is the first time that the subject has been covered in such a comprehensive manner in the form of a reference book. All articles are self-contained, cross-referenced and uniformly structured. The whole is an up-to-date and forward-looking survey of lexicography.

Current Projects in Historical Lexicography

Current Projects in Historical Lexicography
Author: John P. Considine
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2010
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN:

Current Projects in Historical Lexicography brings together seven papers by present and recent editors of historical dictionaries and lexical databases. The collection is introduced with an overview of the history of historical lexicography from the ancient world to the present day, with particular emphasis on the major nineteenth-century dictionaries of German, French, English, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish, and on their successors. In the first paper, Javier MartÃ-n Arista describes the present state of, and the prospects for, the Nerthus lexical database of Old English. The next two introduce specialized dictionaries of the language of medieval and early modern texts: Fernando Tejedo-Herreroâ (TM)s comprehensive dictionary of the language of the great thirteenth-century lawcode Siete Partidas, and Juhani Norriâ (TM)s Dictionary of Medical Vocabulary in English, 1375â "1530. Marijke Mooijaartâ (TM)s paper discusses the online integration of the four historical dictionaries which cover Dutch from the earliest times to the twentieth century. The next two papers, Stefan Dollinger on the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles and the Bank of Canadian English, and Maggie Scott on the Concise Scots Dictionary, describe projects to revise twentieth-century historical dictionaries as the language varieties which they register evolve. Finally, Jeremy Bergersonâ (TM)s paper presents a project for an etymologically rich historical dictionary of Afrikaans. An appendix to the volume comprises two previously unpublished short documents by Katherine Barber and John Considine which bear on the history of the Dictionary of Canadianisms revision project. The contributions to this volume offer a rare set of insights into ongoing lexicographical work, addressing both methodological issues such as inclusion criteria and the balance between diachronic and synchronic coverage, and practical issues such as publication media and funding.

Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary

Ethnocentrism and the English Dictionary
Author: Phil Benson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2002-01-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1134599595

This unique work challenges the assumption that dictionaries act as objective records of our language, and instead argues that the English dictionary is a fundamentally ethnocentric work. Using theoretical, historical and empirical analyses, Phil Benson shows how English dictionaries have filtered knowledge through predominantly Anglo-American perspectives. The book includes a major case study of the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and its treatment of China.

Electronic Lexicography

Electronic Lexicography
Author: Sylviane Granger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 532
Release: 2012-10-25
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0199654867

Professional and academic lexicographers present and discuss innovations, ideas, and developments in all aspects of electronic lexicography including dictionary-writing systems and the integration of corpora for every kind of dictionary in every format.

Taming Babel

Taming Babel
Author: Rachel Leow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2016-07-14
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1107148537

Through a study of Malaysia, Taming Babel examines how empires and postcolonial nation-states struggle to govern multilingual and polyglot subjects.

The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography

The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography
Author: Philip Durkin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 737
Release: 2016
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199691630

This volume provides concise, authoritative accounts of the approaches and methodologies of modern lexicography and of the aims and qualities of its end products. Leading scholars and professional lexicographers, from all over the world and representing all the main traditions andperspectives, assess the state of the art in every aspect of research and practice. The book is divided into four parts, reflecting the main types of lexicography. Part I looks at synchronic dictionaries - those for the general public, monolingual dictionaries for second-language learners, andbilingual dictionaries. Part II and III are devoted to the distinctive methodologies and concerns of the historical dictionaries and specialist dictionaries respectively, while chapters in Part IV examine specific topics such as description and prescription; the representation of pronunciation; andthe practicalities of dictionary production. The book ends with a chronology of the major events in the history of lexicography. It will be a valuable resource for students, scholars, and practitioners in the field.

The Use and Abuse of EFL Dictionaries

The Use and Abuse of EFL Dictionaries
Author: Hilary Nesi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2012-02-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110946033

The book begins with a review of research into dictionary use. A number of experimental design problems are discussed, in particular the unreliability of questionnaire responses, and the need for detailed accounts of individual dictionary consultations whilst sampling in numbers sufficient to represent specified populations. The experiments reported in subsequent chapters investigate issues raised in the review. The first two studies find that dictionary use during a reading comprehension test affected completion speed but not test scores. The apparent failure of dictionary use to improve comprehension is attributed to the test itself, the dictionaries, and the users' choice of look-up words. The ability of users to interpret dictionary entries is investigated in three further studies which use computers to gather data on large numbers of individual consultations. The findings indicate that there is little difference between three major EFL dictionaries in terms of speed of consultation and overall productive success. They also indicate that Malaysian ESL subjects, who have higher vocabulary scores, are slower in their reading and less successfull in their interpretation of entries than Portuguese EFL subjects. Finally, the findings suggest that overall productive success is unaffected by the presence or absence of examples. The experimental findings lead to the conclusion that dictionary consultation is a process in which users match pre-existing beliefs about word meaning and behaviour against segments in the dictionary entry. Such segments are often selected because they are familiar-sounding and conceptually accessible, but may contain only incomplete or non-essential information. Where pre-existing beliefs and dictionary information conflict, dictionary information is sometimes overridden. Thus word knowledge acquired from a single consultation is often insufficient to ensure productive success. Although it is probably inevitable that word knowledge will be acquired slowly, through multiple encounters, modifications to the dictionary entry and the training of users might help to avoid serious misinterpretation of dictionary information.