Cognitive Semantics and the Lexicon

Abstract

Do lexicographers need to know about linguistic theory? Until the beginning of the present century, the answer given by many dictionary project leaders, echoed by some linguists, would have been (and, when asked, often was) a resounding No. This was especially true in the English-speaking world, particularly America, where linguistic theory has had little to say about lexis and still less that was relevant to lexicography. Lexicography was seen as a practical activity, like joinery, requiring skill in using the tools of the trade (definition writing in particular), wide reading in the literature of the language, Sprachgefühl, common sense, and above all mental and physical stamina, rather than knowledge of the grammatical speculations of academic linguists. Taxonomic botanists and classicists, as well as students of literature, could be rapidly turned into practical lexicographers, but from the 1960s to 1990s young people who had been trained in what then passed for theoretical linguistics in the English-speaking world seemed to have acquired an insuperable blindness to distinctions of lexical meaning and an inability to write simple, well-focused, elegant paraphrases or translations. The main task of professional lexicographers was seen as churning out new dictionaries or (more commonly) revising old dictionaries or condensing entries so as to cram a quart into a pint pot, while adding a few new words or new senses to justify the claim ‘new edition’ in response to the marketing needs of dictionary publishers, some of whom took to debasing the term ‘new edition’ with increasingly flagrant cynicism.

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