Oxford Studies in Lexicography and Lexicology – serie

The year 1530 saw the publication in London of one of the most remarkable books of the Renaissance: Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse. The author of this vast work of over 1,000 pages was John Palsgrave, graduate of Cambridge, Paris, and Oxford, priest and chaplain to Henry VIII, and tutor to the King's sister. His book is the first dictionary of two neighbouring vernaculars, English and French, and simultaneously the first contrastive grammar of the two languages. It reveals him as a pioneering and exceptional linguist with a sharply observant and analytical mind, who goes far beyond the traditional application of Latin grammar-writing to two living languages. The book is also remarkable for the liveliness with which Palsgrave discusses and illustrates the social aspects of language use, dialectal variation, and the vigour of colloquial idiom. In this uniquely detailed study Stein sets the author and his book in their wider sociohistorical context and discusses Palsgrave's syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analyses, some of which anticipate the findings of modern linguistics by over 400 years.

This is the first history of dictionaries of English for foreign learners, from their origins in Japan and East Asia in the 1920s to the computerized compilations of the present. Monolingual dictionaries for foreign speakers were a revolutionary development at their outset, and now represent a coming-together of intellectual, technological and commercial forces almost unequalled in book publishing. As the author shows, the early history of EFL dictionaries was research-driven, arising directly from research in linguistic theory and language pedagogy; now it is user-driven, determined by what users require or are thought to require. The pioneering dictionaries were the work of individuals. Current dictionaries are the products of huge databases manipulated by sophisticated processing, as publishers strive to share an immense and constantly growing global market. The book has both a thematic and a chronological structure. Three chapters describe the historical sequence over a period of some sixty years. These alternate with chapters dealing with phraseology, computers and corpus linguistics, and research into dictionary users and uses - three subjects central to the development of ELT dictionaries over the last thirty years. Dr Cowie examines the way in which availability of massive computing power has transformed the recording and analysis of current speech, and shows how the growth of research into the users and uses of dictionaries has led to developments both in ELT lexicography and method. This readable and non-technical account is directed both at professionals in applied linguistics and English language teaching, and at lexicographers, but it will interest and fascinate everyone concerned with the analysis of English and faced with the challenge of recording of the subtelties of its grammar and meaning.

This is a text-based study of fixed expressions, or idioms. Rosamund Moon's central argument is that fixed expressions can only be fully understood if they are considered together with the texts in which they occur. She provides an overview of this area of lexis in current English. Writing from a lexicologicalrather than a computationalpoint of view, she gives a detailed, descriptivist account of the findings of research into several thousand fixed expressions and idioms, as evidenced in the corpus text, including information about frequencies, syntax, lexical forms and variations, and metaphoricality. The author argues that examination of corpus text raises questions about many received ideas on fixed expressions and idioms, and suggests that new or revised use-centred models are required. Later chapters of the book demonstrate the ideological and discoursal significance of idioms, paying particular attention to the ways in which they convey evaluations and have roles with respect to the information structure and cohesion of texts. Series information Series ISBN: 0-19-961811-9 Series Editors: Richard W. Bailey, Noel Osselton, and Gabriele Stein Oxford Studies in Lexicography and Lexicology provides a forum for the publication of substantial scholarly works on all issues of interest to lexicographers, lexicologists, and dictionary users. It is concerned with the theory and history of lexicography, lexicological theory, and related topics such as terminology, and computer applications in lexicography. It focuses attention too on the purposes for which dictionaries are compiled, on their uses, and on their reception and role in society today and in the past.

Medical practitioners of the sixteenth century had their own body of special terms, just like the doctors of this century. McConchie examines medical terminology used in a selection of thirteen medical works published between 1547 and 1612, and compares it with treatment of these words in the Oxford English Dictionary and other dictionaries of today, showing how well - or ill - the specialist terminology of sixteenth-century medical practitioners has been recorded. He compiles a corpus of new data from a selection of medical texts ranging from scholarly tomes to homely handbooks. The study of this corpus reveals errors, omissions, and biases which raise questions for lexicographical tools in general. Are existing dictionaries adequate in their investigation of Renaissance English? Has current understanding been more biased and more deficient than we thought? If so, how are we to redress the problem? This book uses a specialist semantic domain to raise important issues for lexicographers, and historians of early modern English and medicine.

Prototype theory makes a crucial distinction between the central and peripheral sense of words. Geeraerts explores the implications of this model for a theory of semantic change, in the first full-scale treatment of the impact of the most recent developments in lexicological theory on the study of meaning change. He identifies structural features of the development of word meanings which follow from a prototype-theoretical model of semantic structure, and incorporates these diachronic prototypicality effects into a theory of meaning change.The author strikes a balance between theoretical exploration and diachronic description, supporting each step in the argumentation with detailed case studies which chart the semantic development of particular words, or illustrate specific mechanisms of semantic change. Thus the book provides both a theoretical model for diachronic semantics and a number of methodological strategies and representational formats that exemplify how changes of word meaning can be studied in practice.

Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest sets out to explore the pioneering endeavours in both lexicography and lexicology which led to the making of the first English dictionary published by Oxford. Deliberately conceived as a new departure in English lexicography, the first OED, as James Murray stressed, was to be founded on an unequivocal return to first principles, both in the nature of its construction and in the evidence amassed for its compilation. It also produced, as this book shows, a host of problems: on the nature of Englishness, correctness, and general standards of language use, as well as in aspects of pronunciation, semantics, and syntax. Often making use of previously unpublished archive material, this collection of twelve essays provides both a range of perspectives from which the dictionary can be approached, and also explores the particular problems posed by the attempt to realize the pioneering acts of lexicography integral to the making of the dictionary.

Antonymy is recongized as an important type of meaning relation in natural languages, yet there are very few detailed empirical studies of the topic. Through an analysis of a corpus of 43 contemporary English-language novels Dr Mettinger isolates ten syntactic frames within which antonyms are regularly found: these serve as a useful heuristic tool for eliciting opposites from texts. He argues that there are two kinds of antonyms: systemic opposites which have meaning relations definable in strictly semantic terms, and non-systemic opposites which require contextual and encyclopaedic knowledge for an interpretation of their relationship.The author analyses systemic opposites within an autonomous semantics framework based on semantic field theory, using semantic features, semantic dimensions, and archisememes as descriptive tools. His analysis of 350 pairs of antonyms taken from Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases yields a typology of meaning-opposition in English based on syntacticosemantic criteria such as gradability and scalarity which stands in contrast to standard logic-based typologies. Among the specific topics covered are `negative' prefixes, the problem of markedness, and the treatment of meaning-opposition from a cognitive point of view.

Over the last twenty years, phraseology has become a major field of pure and applied research in Western European and North American linguistics. This book is made up of authoritative contributions from leading specialists who examine the increasingly crucial role played by ready-made word-combinations in language acquisition and adult language use. After a wide-ranging introduction by the editor, the book introduces the main theoretical approaches, analyses the corpus data and phrase typology, and finally considers the application of phraseology to associated disciplines including lexicography, language learning, stylistics, and computational analysis. This book is the first comprehensive and up-to-date account of the subject to be published in English. Series InformationSeries ISBN: 0-19-961811-9Series Editors: Richard W. Bailey, Noel Osselton, and Gabriele Stein;Oxford Studies in Lexicography and Lexicology provides a forum for the publication of substantial scholarly works on all issues of interest to lexicographers, lexicologists, and dictionary users. It is concerned with the theory and history of lexicography, lexicological theory, and related topics such as terminology, and computer applications in lexicography. It focuses attention too on the purposes for which dictionaries are compiled, on their uses, and on their reception and role in society today and in the past.

Over the last twenty years phraseology has become an important field of pure and applied research in Western European and North American linguistics. In this book the world's leading specialists examine the crucial role played by ready-made word-combinations in language acquisition and adult language use.After a wide-ranging introduction, the book presents full, critical accounts of the main theoretical approaches, analyses the corpus data and phrase typology, and finally considers the application of phraseology to associated disciplines including lexicography, language learning, stylistics, and computational analysis. This is the first comprehensive and up-to-date account of the subject to be published in English.

This is the first history of dictionaries of English for foreign learners from their origins in Japan and East Asa in the 1920s, to the computerized compilations of the present. Monolingual dictionaries for foreign speakers were a revolutionary development at their outset, and now represent a coming-together of intellectual, technological, and commercial forces almost unequalled in book publishing. As the author shows, the early history of EFL dictionaries was research-driven, arising directly from research in linguistic theory and language pedagogy; now it is user-driven, determined by what users require or are thought to require. The pioneering dictionaries were the work of individuals. Current dictionaries are the products of huge databases manipulated by sophisticated processing, as publishers strive to share an immense and ever growing global market.The book has both a thematic and a chronological structure. Three chapters describe the historical sequence over a period of some sixty years. These alternate with chapters dealing with phraseology, computers and corpus linguistics, and research into dictionary users and uses -- three subjects central to the development of ELT dictionaries over the last thirty years. Anthony Cowie examines the way in which availability of massive computing power has transformed the recording and analysis of current speech, and shows how the growth of research into the users and uses of dictionaries has led to developments both in ELT lexicography and method.This readable and non-technical account is directed at professionals in applied linguistics and English language teaching, and at lexicographers, but it will fascinate everyone concerned with the analysis of English and faced with the challenge of recording the subtleties of its grammar and meaning.