COOPERACIÓN INTERNACIONAL

English-language lexicography has undergone a phase of considerable invention and innovation in the last three decades of the twentieth century. A number of problems in the presentation of lexical information, particularly to language learners, have been solved and there have been considerable

Figure 6.8 A dictionary entry for borrow.

Source: Longman Language Activator, 1994.

advances in the treatment of fixed and idiomatic expressions. Also, given the kind of corpora now available to lexicographers there is also considerable potential for a movement towards the kind of associative lexicon advocated by Adam Makkai in 1980 (Makkai, 1980) and, as a next step, more extensive treatment of style levels (see case study in Chapter 9).

It is paradoxical that the most significant advances in the description of lexico-grammatical patterns have coincided with a time when the interests of linguists have shifted towards patterns of lexis in discourse. This means that lexicography is probably on the verge of even more exciting developments, including a major issue to address, in both theory and practice, in demarcat-ing where grammars stop and where dictionaries start.

Several questions remain, however, which require urgent solutions. Chief among them is: how will lexicographers take a more discourse-based approach which demands attention to words in context? Words in contexts tend to have variable, even negotiable meanings. But lexicographers tend to be concerned mainly with meaning as a property of words and expressions in abstraction from the contexts in which they are used. Does this mean that dictionaries will only record the most fixed and specialized meanings of the more fixed expressions? Or will a range of new, simple and economic conven-tions be developed to handle contextual associaconven-tions? It is clear that computer-based lexicography with access to large corpora is in the forefront of such developments and that work on lexis in discourse as described in Chapter 4 will come to exercise greater influence on lexicographic practice.

This book is not the place to seek such answers, since it is mainly concerned to provide an overview of landmarks in a number of areas. However, one neglected area in lexical entry design which has received insufficient attention is that of stylistic associations or style-values. The problems created by such associations are contingent on those of describing words in discourse con-texts, and the area will be seen to be of considerable importance to non-native language users. A preliminary discussion of this topic is undertaken in the case study which comprises the final chapter of this book.

Notes

1 Note in this connection the publication of books which ‘accompany’ dictionaries and which supply guidance on their use and suggest related teaching procedures, for example, Underhill (1980); Goodale (1995).

2 Weinreich (1980) notes that there will tend to be restricted collocability if the verb is used figuratively rather than literally (e.g. ‘foot the bill’); the semi-metaphorical use of fan and entertain may conceivably account for the semi-restrictedness in collocation.

3 Note, for example, that soft and tender are often cited as synonyms: ‘The skin felt soft/tender’; ‘He touched her softly/tenderly’. But there are collocational restric-tions: The snow was soft/*tender; The bruise was tender/*soft; The meat was tender/*soft. For useful teaching suggestions in this area see Keen (1978, p. 65).

4 Cowie’s paper (Cowie, 1982) discusses a range of disambiguation procedures including determination of superordinate, antonymy tests, selection of synonyms 176 Lexis and lexicography

etc. He concludes that the demarcation of polysemy is extremely difficult. He cites the following sense of post (meaning here ‘letters’, ‘parcels’, etc.) and points out that relations of dependency and contrast commonly hold between the meaning-divisions of lexemes; for example:

(1) The post is terribly slow in England (‘conveyance of post’).

(2) You can just catch the last post (‘collection of post’).

The sense of post here thus requires further subdivision and the identity of the lexeme owes as much to ‘its own internal semantic breakdown and of the meaning-ful relations established by its sense divisions’ than to its external structural semantic relations with other lexemes.

5 Participant roles are a test of the possible separation of meanings in terms of the various entities which participate in an action. The test is applied so far only to verbs denoting spatial movement, change of state, change of custody, contact and communication. The test forms part of work by the Oxford University Press Lexical Research Unit, under the direction of A.P. Cowie and based at the Uni-versity of Leeds, which aims to explore how polysemy is patterned in particular semantic micro-fields. For example,

(1) Mary assembled the crew.

(2) Mary assembled the bookcase.

can be differentiated by reference to the different participant roles of crew (‘actor’) and bookcase (‘product’ or ‘object of result’). For further discussion and analysis see Jeffries and Willis (1982b).

6 Examination of the corpus reveals, for example, a whole range of different prag-matic functions for a conjunction such as if. Traditional entry design might mark if as signalling the introduction of a conditional clause but the range of functions is very large indeed. The following are merely selections from the COBUILD data-base: ‘the rates are good, if not better, than many term shares’; ‘her voice was, if not perfect, at least nearly so’; ‘He’s very strong if rather small’; ‘it’s a great opportun-ity, a paid holiday if you like’; ‘he’s earning £20,000 a year, if not more’; ‘if it’s an offence, it’s an offence’; ‘it’s not as if he were a relative’; ‘if only we could make a radio’; ‘if you can just sign that for me, thank you’. For example, the function in the last example is that of polite request in spoken contexts. In this example, the pragmatic function may be more accurately termed one of polite digression: ‘if I might just come in here for a moment and say a word in his defence’.

7 Willis and Willis (1987–8) is a beginner’s course-book for foreign learners of English in active preparation using actual corpus-based citations and introducing lexical items with reference to frequency statistics drawn from COBUILD data.

8 Makkai uses the word ‘associative’ in its Saussurean sense in an article ‘Theoretical and practical aspects of an associative lexicon for 20th century English’ (Makkai, 1980). He is interested in trying to represent lexicographically a speaker’s accumulated total knowledge of the structural associations of a lexical item(s):

Dictionaries, by and large, have tended to ignore the associative groupings of lexemes as they form NATURAL SEMANTIC NESTS, around concretely observable and abstract (nonobservable) entities, and their traditional reli-ance on alphabetization endeavoured to present a totality of the available lexis while ignoring frequency of usage, exact range of dialectal habitat, the speaker’s sociological status, etc.

(Makkai, 1980, p. 127) 9 For further relevant surveys see Stein (1979), Hartmann (1981b) and Bogaards

(1996).

7 Learning and teaching