3.4.3 "Active" and encyclopaedic dictionaries

The main declared aim of some dictionaries is to go beyond the word level in order to reach the level of the phrase or of the collocation. The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English: A Guide to Word Combinations, by M. Benson, E. Benson and R. Ilson (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, J. Benjamins Co., 1986) gives the co-occurrences or collocations of the listed words. Here is a sample entry:

annoyance n. 1. to express; feel; show - 2. - at, over, with 3. - that + clause (his - that he had been awakened so early was evident) 4. to one's - (much to my -, he was late)

There is no proper definition of the word — although its meaning may sometimes be inferred from the examples; the entry provides the transitive verbs that are most frequently found before the noun, the main prepositions that follow it, and two typical patterns. The entries are arranged in alphabetical order and only include nouns, adjectives and full verbs. Given the aims of the dictionary, any entries trying to provide the collocations for articles, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliaries or modals would be totally unmanageable from the technical point of view.

The Combinatory Dictionary, therefore, goes one step further from monolingual dictionaries for native speakers; by emphasising the combinatory level, it becomes a reference book intended to help not so much with the comprehension of texts in the foreign language but rather in their production. A certain amount of help in that direction is also provided by monolingual dictionaries for foreign learners, but here the productive dimension here is enhanced and systematically developed.

Another leap forward is represented by the Longman Language Activator (1993), a synthesis of the most advanced lexicography at the service of the foreign learner that has to produce an English text. For practical reasons all the words are entrered in alphabetical order, but most of them simply refer the user to one of the 1052 main entries (words or phrases) under which they are grouped and described.

The idea is that the person looking up a word or phrase may have some general concept in mind (for example, CUT) and needs to be helped to find the word that can be used with some foodstuff (to slice). Some entries refer to frequent and important speech acts like ASK A QUESTION, ASK FOR STH/ASK SB TO DO STH, listed under ASK. Other key-words refer to such basic semantic notions as the plural, quantity, comparison and increase, like MORE THAN A NUMBER OR AMOUNT and MORE THAN BEFORE. Under NOT one can find, beside negative words, cross-references to the key-words or phrases NOT DO STH, NOT HAVE, NOT KNOW, NOT MOVING, DON'T LIKE and DON'T THINK SO/DOUBT IT.

The dictionary does not list the words whose meaning is supposed to be known — the ones in the defining vocabulary — if their use does not pose any special problems: among these, for example, are the nouns BOOK e COAL; the verb BOOK is recorded, instead, in connection with buying nad selling, and so are the idioms bring sb to book under PUNISH, by the book under RIGHT/PROPER and go by the book under OBEY.

From the lexicological point of view, the Activator is a hybrid of semasiological and onomasiological processes; this produces a low degree of internal coherence and an amount of arbitrariness in the choices that is greater, on the whole, than in most other dictionaries. The explanation that is offered by its compilers refers to the practical usefulness for foreigners: it is not so much the "logic" of the conceptual framework that matters, but the simple fact that the dictionary actually meets the needs it intends to cater for.

Encyclopaedic dictionaries list commom words together with a number of propre nouns (geographical names, famous people, hystorical events, etc.), giving some essential information; two entries are given below from Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, College Edition, The World Publishing Co., Cleveland and New York, 1968.

1) Petrarch n. (Francesco Petrarca), Italian poet, rhetorician, and humanist; 1304-1374.

This entry is immediately followed by a larger one on the Petrarchan sonnet. For an American student at College level — the type of user envisaged by this dictionary — the notion of Petrarchan sonnet (a genre with important examples in English literature) is more important than the information on the poet after whom the sonnet is named. For a non-native user, in this case, an encyclopaedic dictionary is useful to check whether there is an anglicised form of a proper noun (see in chap. IV the reading "Tradurre e no").

2) Newcastle n. The county seat of Northumberland, England: pop., 269,000.

The presence of the place-name leads to a sub-entry with an idiom that is normally recorded under coal.

A bigger book, Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary, published in New York in 1994 by Gramercy Books and based on the 1983 edition of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, also includes the entries Petrarchan, Petrarchism and Petrarchist. The dictionary proper is followed by 11 special supplements and repertories:

- Chronology of Major Dates in History: a repertory of the most important historical dates. To give you an idea of the contents: the first six pages cover the time between 3200 B.C. and 1300 A.D. and the last six from April 7^th, 1979 to October 3^rd, 1983;

- Major Reference Works: a repertory of bibliographies and reference books in several fields, from literature to science;

- A Manual of Style, giving advice on punctuation, italics, footnotes, abbreviations, etc.; some 20 pages out of about 40 deal with compound words, saying whether they should be spelt as one word or hyphenated;

- The Bad Speller's Dictionary: a repertory of the words that are easily confused — homophones or quasi- homophones — or that are frequently mis-spelt;

- Rhyming Dictionary and Glossary of Poetic Terms: in the Rhyming Dictionary the words are listed on the basis of their endings, under entries like -ation or -ouse;

- Crossword Puzzle Dictionary: a section listing definition of obscure, infrequent words, like defensive work of piles for estacade.

There are several differences between British English (BrE) and American English (AmE) at the lexical level. By way of example, here are two lists of words; the first deals with topics of everyday life:

Let us now see another list of examples, this time within a specific semantic area — the vocabulary concerning transportation, road traffic and cars:

Both lists contain words that appear in both columns because they have different meanings in BrE e in AmE, words like mad and hood. There are several cases (e.g. sick vs. ill and mail vs. post) where both words exist in both varieties but with differences in the frequency of use or with additional specialised meanings in one variety only.

3.4.4 Dictionaries of quotations, biographies, etc.

The dictionaries of quotations can be considered a specialised variety of encyclopedic dictionaries. Like all languages enjoying a great literary and cultural tradition, English is rich in famous quotes and well-known sentences (mostly from historical events or literary works) that are also used in everyday language. Some of these expressions — for example, many quotations from the Bible — are shared by all the European cultures; others, like "C'è del marcio in Danimarca" spread from English into other languages and cultures.

The title of a play by g. B. Shaw, Arms and the Man, reflects the first line of Virgil's Aeneid: "Arma virumque cano", the same recalled by Torquato Tasso in "Canto l'armi pietose e il capitano / Che il gran Sepolcro liberò di Cristo." If a person comments someone's words saying that "Brutus is an honourable man", this a quotation from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and in particular from Mark Antony's funeral oration which concludes that the "honourable man" has in fact unlawfully plotted against his emperor. Not recognising quotations, then, is not only a mark of ignorance, with the possible loss of culturally relevant intertextual connexions, but also a real risk of misunderstanding or not understanding what we hear or read.

Most dictionaries of quotations are organised, like Roget's Thesaurus, in two parts: the first contains the collection of quotations, usually in alphabetical order by author (or by title in some special cases, like the entry Bible); the second is the index of the key words: through horse one can find both "My kingdom for a horse!" (Shakespeare, Richard III, V, iv, 7) and "All the king's horses" (Nursery Rhymes: Humpty Dumpty).

There are dictionaries of quotations that select a specific regional and/or cultural setting, like American Quotations (New York City, Wings Books, 1988 — 2^nd ed. 1992). Beside such entries as Humour, Knowledge e Wisdom one can find others like Abraham Lincoln and New York City. A final Index allows the retrieval of quotations from other key-words.

The repertories of proverbs and idioms are similar to the collections of quotations — except that they are anonymous: the author is not known and they belong to a people's inheritance or folk-lore. A collection of proverbs and idioms is found in § 3 of this chapter.

Finally, there are the various editions of Who's Who, biographical repertories of celebrities in general or of very important people in the various fields, from politics to entertainment, from science to industry, from art to sports. They are of English origin but the Italian versions are now becoming popular, too.

3.4.5 Dictionaries of slang and unconventional English

Three English words correspond to Italian gergo to describe registers that are considered substandard and/or non-conventional:

jargon: the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group of people — e.g., the jargon of advertising, the jargon of sailing, the jargon of London taxi-drivers;

slang: an informal non-standard vocabulary composed typically of coinages, arbitrarily changed words, and extravagant, forced, or facetious figures of speech, typical of conversations between relatives or friends;

cant: the private language of the underworld.

Contemporary literature and journalism (in particular, when they deal with underground activities) abound in slang that has to be known in order to understand those texts. They are mostly words and phrases that are used in limited areas or by comparatively small groups of people. The expression nonce words describes words coined on a special occasion or for a specific purpose. Most of these words disappear after some time, when the fashion changes or the word is replaced by another that is felt to be stronger or more colourful. Some of them, however, become part of everyday language either by adding new terms or by re-defining existing words — such is the case of gay, whose unconventional and once taboo meanings ("homosexual", referring to a person; "used by homosexuals", said of a place, e. g. gay bar) have now totally replaced the old usages.

An incentive to the diffusion of some slang is therefore connected with an ever wider acceptance, on the media and in many conversational situation, of words that not long ago were considered taboo in the same contexts ("four-letter words" and their derivatives). For example, the word snafus was used by International Herald Tribune (10 June 1994, p. 21) to describe the numerous snags and errors in the reservations and sales of tickets for the 1999 Soccer World Championship in the USA. The expression comes from military slang; the habitual answer to questions like How are things? or How's life? was that everything was chaotic, just as usual: Situation normal - all fucked up. The first letters gave the acronym snafu, which in time left the barracks and little by little got into the pages of international newspapers; in the meantime it was converted from an interjection into a transitive verb and a countable noun.

The 1968 Webster (see above) enters it informing that it belongs to military slang and giving "fouled (euphemism)" for the taboo word. The other Webster (Gramercy 1994) gives fouled without stating that it is a euphemism. The entry snafu is not found in the learners' dictionaries published in England in the 80's; it is recorded in both the pronunciation dictionaries quoted above and in the third edtion (1995) of the LDOCE. This dictionary says that snafu is American, which is correct, and it is a noun used in the singular only, which is not. It does not mention the fact that it is an acronym.

The dictionaries dealing with slang and unconventional English collect many of the words that are not recorded in standard dictionaries although they had some diffusion and appeared in print. H. WENTWORTH and S.B. FLEXNER's Dictionary of American Slang (New York, Crowell, 1967) has some appendices describing the various classes of words and the most frequent affixation processes that are active in this type of language. Just because they are non-conventional processes, these ways in which slang neologisms develop (by derivation, alteration, conversion, compounding, etc.) are often revealing of more general processes at work also in the standard language, and of emerging tendencies.

3.4.6. New (traditional and electronic) dictionaries, further developments, and the exam

The objective of this chapter is NOT to provide a survey of the existing dictionaries — for the very simple reason that the production is enormous and new works (or new, significantly revised editions of existing works) appear every month. Statements that are accurate at the moment of writing (spring 2000) will be obsolete when you read these words. There is also a lot to say about the new generation of electronic dictionaries (on CD or on-line) but this topic has been dealt with elsewhere.

Instead, the objective is to sensitise students to all the technicalities involved in vocabulary selection, definitions, semantics vs. pragmatics, grammatical descriptions, organisation of entries and sub-entries, etc. In our experience, few students devote enough time to reading the introduction, the notes on usage, the appendices, etc. — the so-called paratext. The following paragraphs provide a guideline for the part of the exam that deals with the familiarity with a dictionary.

The description of the course says that the students are to show that they are familiar with the lexicographic organisation of a monolingual dictionary or of a special dictionary (pronunciation, synonyms, false friends, etc.). The examinees should avoid choosing dictionaries for intermediate students (or lower levels, or abridged, pocket-size dictionaries, etc.). If possible, avoid the usual, most frequent Learner's dictionaries (Oxford Advanced, COBUILD, Longman, Cambridge) and prefer dictionaries that have some traits that are interesting to analyse from the point of view of lexicology or lexicography. Bilingual dictionaries or glossaries can be classed as "special" only if they are quite different from standard bilingual dictionaries like those published by Zanichelli, Garzanti, SEI, etc.

Here are a few recommendations and suggestions in question form:

1. What is the "history" of the chosen dictionary — the date of the first edition and of any relevant revisions or new editions, the date of the current edition, etc.?
2. Can you describe it correctly in terms of type (e.g. ‘monolingual, encyclopaedic, for native speakers')? Consequently, is it mainly intended for comprehension purposes or it is an "active" dictionary — or a special dictionary of some kind?
3. What are its main lexicological features? (for example, show that you know that D in COBUILD stands for database, not dictionary and realise what this implies in terms of the relationships between computer science and lexicography).
4. In particular, has a defining vocabulary been adopted, or are there any other criteria for the selection of the words that are used to define the entries?
5. Are there any pictures, graphs, charts or tables? For what purposes? About what subjects?…
6. What additional information is supplied with each entry (e.g. syllable division, etymology, or what else)?
7. How are entries ordered and organised? For example, are phrasal verbs listed under the main verb or as separate entries?
8. Can you read the phonetic transcription accurately, whatever method is adopted by the dictionary? Consequently, can you describe the differences from the system adopted in the course?
9. What is the meaning of the letters, numbers and/or graphic marks that are used to subdivide entries into sub-entries, additional sections, lists of examples, etc.?
10. What grammatical information is supplied (about uncountable nouns, verb patterns, etc.) in the entries? What symbols or abbreviations are used?
11. Are there any further explanations about grammar in the Introduction or in other parts of the paratext? Are there any tables or lists of irregular verbs or plural forms, etc.?
12. Does the dictionary provide information of an encyclopaedic kind? Are there any tables with special terminologies (e.g. weights and measurements, military ranks, and the like)?
13. Can you find the meaning of abbreviations commonly used in English (such as MOT, MEP, and so on)? Can they be found in the body of the dictionary, in special lists, or not at all?
14. If it is a pronouncing dictionary, have you read carefully and understood what the introduction and/or the explanatory "windows" say about the various aspects of English phonetics and phonology?
15. If it is a collection of quotations, idioms, synonyms or phraseology of any kind, can you describe how the work is organised? In particular, if the alphabetical order has been abandoned, what onomasiological criteria have adopted? How can users find the items they are interested in?
16. If it is a glossary of a specialised sector, can you use it because you have some knowledge of the subject matter involved?

These guidelines are offered for orientation only and therefore they are not exhaustive; most questions are "open" and many suggestions are just examples. It is your duty to show that you are not only a competent, efficient user of that dictionary, but that you have also developed a clear understanding of its scope, purposes, organisation and lexicographic choices. You will also be asked to evaluate it in terms of real helpfulness to you as a student (or as a translator, teacher, or for any work activities you may be engaged in): good points and weak points, shortcomings, faults, and so on, from your own point of view.