Linguistics and Lexicography - reviews & further information

Better Words: Evaluating EFL Dictionaries

Gabriele Stein  

Better Words provides an introduction to EFL lexicography and an insight into its fundamental issues and problems.  It describes in detail the major changes that have occurred in the production of EFL dictionaries over recent decades and will help teachers and their students to assess the description of the word stock on offer and to decide which EFL dictionary is the most adequate for their specific purposes.

During the last twenty-five years lexicographers and their publishers have experimented with new ways of describing and presenting the words included in their EFL dictionaries to make them more accessible to users.  This book compares these dictionaries and critically reviews the lexicographal achievements in the description and presentation of word meanings, registers, exemplification, cultural contexts and pictorial illustrations.  It also examines the advantages and disadvantages of using a bilingual and a monolingual EFL dictionary.

Better Words is a companion volume to Chosen Words: Past and Present Problems for Dictionary Makers  by Noel Osselton (1995) and Living Words: Language, Lexicography and the Knowledge Revolution by Tom McArthur (1998).  Both are published by University of Exeter Press in the series Exeter Language and Lexicography.  The general editors of this series are Reinhard Hartmann and Tom McArthur.  

• "Professor Stein is one of the most active and authoritative figures working in the field of English Language Studies today." A.P. Cowie, Editor, International Journal of Lexicography

• "Vocabulary learning skills are like all tools: they are immensely varied and good workmanship presupposes having clearly identified the job to be done, knowing the range and exquisite specificity of tools available for it, making adequate selections and applying them skilfully." Gabrielle Stein, from the Introduction to Better Words

Market: Teachers of EFL and those training to be EFL teachers.  Lexicographers.  EFL students in schools, colleges and universities.  Libraries.

Author: Gabriele Stein is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Heidelberg and has published many books on English grammar and lexicology.  She was the founding president of the European Association for Lexicography.

Contents

1.   Foreword
2.    The English Dictionary : Past, Present and Future
3.    EFL Dictionaries, the Teacher and the Student
4.    From the Bilingual to the Monolingual Dictionary
5.   The Best of British and American Lexicography
6.   Word-Formation in Modern English Dictionaries
7.   Recent Developments in EFL Dictionaries
8.   The Dictionary and the Language Learner
9.   EFL Dictionaries : Meaning, Culture, Illustrations
10. Social and Stylistic Stratification in English Vocabulary and Its Treatment in Pedagogical Dictionaries
11.  Illustrations in Dictionaries
12.  Exemplification in EFL Dictionaries

Index
Bibliography

Chosen Words

What goes into our dictionaries and why? This informative collection of essays shows how dictionaries today have grown from the small beginnings of English lexicography in Shakespeare's time. Discussion is anchored in the practice of the past, but the author has been concerned throughout to show how the difficulties which beset the first compilers are still with us today. The essays may thus be read as a stimulating, even chastening, introduction to some of the practical problems that might confront any trainee lexicographer.

The product of over forty years' scholarly work on Cawdrey, Kersey, Bailey, Johnson and other lexicographers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these essays cover a wide variety of topics, including dialect words, variant spellings, how strict the alphabetical order can or should be, the treatment of phrasal verbs, of the literary and learned language, of common words, archaism and figurative usage. There are also critical assessments of some of the great historical dictionaries of Europe.

Readership: Postgraduates and undergraduates studying lexicography. Historians of language. Linguists with an interest in lexicography.

N.E. OSSELTON has divided his academic career equally between universities in Holland (Groningen, Leiden) and England (Southampton, Newcastle); he has held chairs of English Language in both countries. He was a founder member (and later President) of the European Association for Lexicography and now lives in retirement in Durham.

Communication Across Cultures

‘This book is a useful addition to the material currently available on Arabic/English contrastive linguistics and translation . . .  It is full of interesting insights into the way modern Standard Arabic actually works, and the theoretical proposals and translation problems presented are typically intriguing and challenging, and presented in such a way as to stimulate further thought.’
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2000), 27(1), 91-111

" . . . a fine book full of textual ideas and suggestions for further reflections."
IRAL, Vol. XXXVI/2, May 1998

". . . a challenging book which . . . will interest linguists, post-structuralists and translators of sophisticated texts in any language." The Linguist, Vol. 36, No. 4, 1997

While the literature on either contrastive linguistics or discourse analysis has grown immensely in the last twenty years, very little of it has ventured into fusing the two perspectives. Bearing in mind that doing discourse analysis without a contrastive base is as incomplete as doing contrastive analysis without a discourse base, the specific aim of this book is to argue that translation can add depth and breadth to both contrastive linguistics as well as to discourse analysis.

Authentic data from both spoken and written English is used throughout to add clarity to theoretical insights gained from the study of discourse processing. Each aspect of the model proposed for the analysis of texts is related separately to a problem of language processing and in domains as varied as translation, interpreting, language teaching etc. The global objectives pursued in this volume are the training of future linguists and the sensitization of users of language in general to the realities of discourse.

Readership: Undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers, lecturers in departments of linguistics, applied linguistics, languages, translation and interpreting, communication studies, particularly in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and Australia.

BASIL HATIM is Director of Studies for Arabic at Heriot-Watt University and Principal Lecturer on the Master programme in English/Arabic Translation and Interpreting. He has lectured widely in translation theory at universities throughout the UK, Europe and the Middle East, and published extensively on the applications of text linguistics to translation theory and practice.

Living Words

‘There are many valuable insights in this collection of papers . . . The articles in this collection will fascinate lexicographers.’
International Journal of Lexicography, Vol13, No 2, 2000

Living Words ranges widely over three main linked subjects:

• Language at large and in particular English, the most widely used language in the history of the world

• The art and study of dictionaries and reference science, embracing all past, present and potential reference materials-from the OED to the Yellow Pages

• The processes through which communication, information and knowledge have evolved-from cave art to the personal computer

Author: Tom McArthur is an independent writer, editor, consultant and broadcaster, and editor of English Today: the international review of the English language, the quarterly review published by Cambridge University Press. He is Deputy Director of the Dictionary Research Centre and Honorary University Fellow at the University of Exeter, and General Editor with R.R.K. Hartmann of the series Exeter Language and Lexicography. He has published over 20 books and is the editor of The Oxford Companion to the English Language.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Living words
1 Bagaba and carcari: or, the paradox at the heart of language
2 Rhythm, rhyme, and reason: the power of patterned sound
3 The power of words: pressure, prejudice, and politics in our vocabularies and dictionaries
4 The word word
5 The vocabulary-control movement in the English language, 1844-1953

Language
6 Wee Jimmy and the dugs: or, where do YOU stand in the classroom?
7 The usage industry
8 Problems of purism and usage in editing English Today
9 The pedigree of plain English
10 The printed word in the English-speaking world

Lexicography
11 The background and nature of ELT learners' dictionaries
12 Thematic lexicography
13 Reference materials and their formats
14 A mutually defining circle of words: some reflections on the making of the Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English
15 Culture-bound and trapped by technology: centuries of bias in the making of wordbooks
16 Guides to tomorrow's English: dictionaries for a universal language

The knowledge revolution
17 What then is reference science?
18 The scholarly guild
19 Knowledge, knowledge everywhere: the global library
20 Themes and dreams: the romance of the database
21 Representing knowledge for human consumption

Appendix
The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary of Language Teaching

Solving Language Problems

The book provides an overview of key areas and will serve as a useful introductory text for those following university courses in this field.

Readership: Undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers, lecturers in Departments of Linguistics, applied linguistics, languages, psychology, lexicography and computer science.

R.R.K. HARTMANN is Director of the MA/Diploma Course in Applied Linguistics and Reader in Applied Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics, University of Exeter. He is a co-author of a Dictionary of Language and Linguistics (1972), editor of several lexicographical books, founding Secretary and former President of EURALEX, as well as editorial adviser to all the major lexicographical periodicals and series in Europe.

CONTENTS

1. The Character of the Earliest English Dictionaries
2. Figurative Words: Modern Practice and the Origins of a Labelling Tradition
3. Common Words: John Kersey and the First General Dictionary of English
4. Dialect Words in General Dictionaries
5. Old Words: Defining Obsolescence
6. Literary Words: Blount's Glossographia and Sir Thomas Browne
7. Setting up a New Bilingual Vernacular Dictionary: Henry Hexham (1647)
8. Style Markers: Early Bilingual Dictionaries and English Usage
9. Fixing the Spelling: Errour and Honor in Johnson and Bailey
10. Phrasel Verbs: Dr Johnson's Use of Bilingual Sources
11. A Dictionary Compiler at Work in the Sixteenth Century
12. Alphabetization in Early Dictionaries of English
13. An Eighteenth-Century Bilingualized Learners' Dictionary
14. Secondary Documentation in Historical Lexicography
15. Dictionary Criticism
16. Bilingual Dictionaries with Dutch: a Case Study in European Lexicography

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