2. Old method, old custom, old dream, old archive;

3. Old industry equipment, old material, old clothes, old house.

If the dictionary does not belong to the type in which the indication of the equivalence Chinese jiu, German alt 'old' is sufficient, viz. if the dictionary is to have a greater descriptive power, it will be necessary to disambiguate the German equivalent, i.e. to indicate which of its senses do apply and to state that the sense as in Er ist U Jahrc alt 'He is 14 years old' does not. Let us now suppose that the usual method of the dictionary would be the indication of synonyms (irrespective whether

81 Accompanied by examples or not). One can assume that the entry could have a form like the following one:

[Chinese]^ш, [German] (I) altjruher, ehemalig, 'old, former, previous';

2. alt, shon lange bestehend 'old , already existing for a long time';

3. alt, gebraucht, durch langen Gebrauch abgemacht 'old, used, worn out by long use'.

When we consider these indications we cannot fail to perceive the difference between an equivalent like alt 'old' which is undoubtedly lexical unit, ready to be inserted into a sentence, and durch langen Gebrauch abgemacht 'worn out of long use' or schon lange bestehend 'existing for a long time' which are not quite stabilized lexical units and which though they could be inserted at least into some of the contexts are felt as non-minimal, as expansions of what could be said by alt, but on the other hand, these latter equivalents have the advantage that they, taken in isolation, give more information about the lexical meaning of the source language lexical unit.

We call the equivalents of the first type translational or insertible equivalents, those of the second type explanatory or descriptive ones. The basic difference between them is not their status as lexical units (there are some explanatory equivalents which are fully stabilized lexical units, though more frequently they are not). The main distinction is that when choosing a translational, insertible equivalent, the main concern is given (within the boundary of correct possibilities) to its ability to be used in a fluent, good translation of whole sentences, to be inserted into contexts of the target language whereas the explanatory or descriptive equivalent is chosen in order to give more information about the lexical unit of the target language

Naturally there are many equivalents which combine both the advantages; e.g. gebraucht 'used' (which occurs in the same example) seems to be a good translational equivalent with a high explanatory power, And it is also certain that sometimes it is difficult to draw a line between the two types.

ROBERT ILSON

British and american lexicography6

Let me now give a brief survey of some examples of Anglo-American lexicographic co-operation in the fairly recent past: some of you will already be aware of the interesting and controversial contribution to this discussion made by Robert Burchfield in Encounter.

In 1971 the American College Dictionary (ACD) became what Noel Osselton would perhaps call the 'catalyst' for the British Hamlyn Encyclopedic World Dictionary, which in its turn began the recent Australian Macquarie Dictionary (Macq. \ indicating not only that ACD is one of the most influential English-language dictionaries of modem times, but that English-language lexicography is by no means limited to Britain and America. The British publisher Collins once owned the American publisher World, publishers of Webster's New World dictionaries. During this period Collins brought out a Concise dictionary modelled on an American concise dictionary, which was sold here for a while but has since gone out of print owing to the success of a dictionary originated here, the Collins English Dictionary of 1979 (CED). Note that some people who worked on CED had previously worked on Hamlyn. For some years Longman have been in partnership with the American Merriam-Webster company, using the text of the Merriam- Webster English Collegiate Dictionary - the so-called Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (№"#), first published in 1973 — as what Professor Osselton would call the catalyst for two British dictionaries: the Longman New Universal Dictionary of 1982 (LNUD), which is smaller than Wh, and the Longman Dictionary of the English Language of 1984 yLDEL), which is larger than W&. And, also in 1984, the Reader's Digest Great Illustrated Dictionary (GID) used as its catalyst the text of the American Heritage

Dictionary (AHDf), first published in 1969 — to be distinguished, from AHD's Second College Edition of 1982 (AHD₂).

These dictionaries all exemplify lexicographic movement from west to east — from America to Britain, or from America to Australia via Britain. But there is also movement from east to west. The Oxford American Dictionary of 1980 (OAD) was based on, but enlarged from, the British Oxford Paperback Dictionary of 1979 (OPD). And. in the area of learners' dictionaries, the Oxford Student's Dictionary of American English of 1983 was based on the British Oxford Student's Dictionary of Current English of 1978, whereas the British Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English of 1978 (LDOCE) became in 1983 the catalyst for two shorter dictionaries, the British Longman Active Study Dictionary of English {LASDE) and the Longman Dictionary of American English (LDAE).

AH this is important for two reasons, first, to show that Anglo-American lexicographic co-operation seems to make good sense: hardheaded commercial publishers see fit to engage in these projects. And second, because in the ensuing discussion of dictionaries it is rather important, 1 think, to understand what Robert Burchfield has called their 'genealogies'.

/

That brings me to Table 1, which shows design features of some typical British and American dictionaries of the present day. In this table I concentrate on general or overall design features of dictionaries: tilings that will strike the user first-off, as soon as he opens the dictionary. But what do I mean by a 'dictionary' here? In this table I deal not with monolingual learners' dictionaries, not with children's dictionanes, not with bilingual dictionaries or with technical dictionaries, etc., but rather with general-purpose monolingual English dictionaries for the adult native speaker. That will be my unmarked case, though later on I hope to make a few observations on dictionaries of other types. And of the very many and very diverse dictionaries available in Britain and America, 1 have taken as my American representatives examples of the so-called college or collegiate dictionary, and as my British representatives those dictionaries that seem to be most nearly to fulfil the role of the college dictionary in America — which is roughly, 1 suppose, to be the top of their publishers⁷ general line: 'the flagship', to use a recently popular phrase. In the case of Longman the choice is difficult as between LNIJD and LDEL: I've chosen the more recent one because I like to be up to date. I've arranged these dictionaries in chronological order by nation, so that, reading from left to right, one has WNWD (1979-80), AHD₂ (1982), W₉ (1983). I apologize for not including other American dictionaries of this type, such as Random House: they were simply not available to me at the tune I prepared my material. Then for British dictionaries I have CED (1979), COD₇ (1982), Chambers (1983), GID (1984), LDEL (1984).

The first row concerns their size, and two things emerge rather strongly. First, the relative uniformity in size of the American dictionaries, on the basis of their self-deccription: all this information comes from the publishers' blurbs attached to the dictionaries themselves. Second, the dissimilarity in size of the British dictionaries. That is not surprising, because in Britain there seems to be no generally agreed type of dictionary which corresponds to and plays the role of the college dictionary in the USA. More interesting are the different criteria invoked to measure the size of dictionaries. There is talk of things like entries, definitions, references (whatever they are), vocabulary items, head words and, finally, a relatively new measurement, I think, the number of words of running text in the dictionary, of which CED claims 3 million and CID claims about 4 million. How difficult it is, in the light of all these discrepant criteria, for the user — or indeed the lexicographer — to know what he's paying his money for (I do not propose to compare dictionary prices)! I would make a plea either for publishers to begin to agree on a standardised measure of the size of their dictionaries or for professional bodies like EURALEX and DSNA to act as a kind of Bureau of Standards to get some kind of common measure of size, at least.

The second row shows pronunciation systems. All the dictionaries on my list, both British and American, use respelling except for CED, which uses JJPA. 1 could sa> a lot about the different kinds of respelling systems: those which use a relatively

large number of diacritics, those which use a very small nmnber of dictionaries, those which use no diacritics. (They all use 1э] but some use other symbols as well.) I won't do that, however, because 1 have something more important to say. This morning we heard what on balance 1 still consider the good news from Robert Burchfield that the Oxford English dictionaries are going over to tPA. But that is the calculation of a development which has been going on for a long time: from the brave days when Henry Cecil Wyld used a dual transcription system in his Universal Dictionary of 1932 (respelling and 'near-IPA^:) through when Longmans English Larousse used IPA in 1968, as did its successor, the Longman Modern Englisn Dictionary of 1976 (LMED), to the big commercial breakthrough of 1979 when CED used IPA, as have its subsequent smaller spin-off dictionaries, the Concise of 1982 and the Compact of 1984. Then Oxford weighed in with IPA in their Little Oxford Dictionary of I960 and their Oxford Mimdictionury of 1981, and Harrap used IPA in their Mini Pocket Dictionary of 1983, The most recent convert to IPA is the Pocket Oxford Dictionary in its latest, seventh, edition of 1984. So we now have Collins and Oxford firmly committed to the cause of IPA whereas Longman in their native-speaker dictionaries have gone back from their earlier use of IPA to what 1 think is radier good and ingenious respelling system. Reader's Digest and Chambers also are respelling. In Australia the big new Macquarie Dictionary uses IPA.

The same change to IPA in native-speaker dictionaries happened in France — about fifteen or twenty years ago. The same arguments were heard there as are still heard here, about the difficulties of IPA for a general-purpose native-speaker dic­tionary. The same struggles took place. But in France the battle was w^ron many years ago and now as far as I know all the major French 'trade' dictionaries, even the Petit Larousse. use IPA. Why it happened there first is hard to say, and perhaps some people will want to comment in the discussion. On the other hand in America this development has hardly begun at all. IPA is used in some bilingual dictionaries and monolingual learners' dictionaries, of course. Trager-Smith is used in the American ladder Dictionary, and the new LDAE uses an adroit system that combines Trager-

Smith with ГРА. IPA is also used in specialised dictionaries like Kenyon and Knott's Pronouncing Dictionary of American English and the Barnhart dictionaries of New English, but not yet in any trade dictionary, One can but speculate on the reasons why different countries have taken different paths, though the observation by Joyce Hawkins in the preface to the Oxford Minidictionary, that IPA was adopted in that dictionary 'for international convenience', may be revealing. I think that Dr Burchfield was making the same suggestion when he talked about the sales of English native-speaker dictionaries in countries where English is not the first language, <.,.>

The third row is about the treatment of 'open' noun compounds, such as white paper, little owl, night owl, hammer and sickle. All these are written as more than one word and function as nouns rather than as adverbs, as adjectives, or as any other part of speech. The American dictionaries all treat them as main entries — but the British ones divide. COD and Chambers treat them as sub-entries — as idioms, one might say — but CED, GID and LDEL treat them as main entries, This makes me feel that the five British dictionaries are dividable into two classes: the American-influenced ones and what you might call the autochthonous British ones: COD and Chambers. The American-influenced ones themselves are of two types: CID and LDEL.. which actually used the text of an existing American dictionary as their basis, though departing from and adding to it in all sorts of ways, and CED, which is not based on any particular American dictionary but nevertheless reflects American lexicographic practice. These dictionaries will be relevant elsewhere in the tables, too.

The fourth row is about the use of pictures. All the American dictionaries use them. None of the British dictionaries uses them, with the notable exception of GID, which is lavishly illustrated in colour, No doubt, as has been suggested in earlier talks, there are historical reasons for the reluctance to use illustrations in 'serious¹ native-speaker dictionaries in Britain. But I think that reluctance is regrettable,

The fifth row is about biographical and geographical entries: entries for real people and places as opposed to fictitious people and places, entries for Aristotle as well as for Ajax, for Atlanta in Georgia as well as for Atlantis, the mythical continent. Once again this is a feature shared by all the American dictionaries, whether they put their 'bios' and "geos' in the A-Z text (like WNWD) or in appendices (like AHD₂ and Wy). Placement can vary from edition to edition of the same dictionary; AHDj had its 'bios' and 'geos' in the A-Z text. As for the British dictionaries, a clear division emerges between the American-influenced ones, which have 'bios' and 'geos' and the autochthonous ones, which don't.

Next, synonym essays; essays which discuss near-synonyms like haste, hurry, speed, expedition, dispatch and say how they are differentiated from one another as well as what they have in common. This is a feature of all the American dictio­naries—but of only one of the British dictionaries: LDEL. G1D has lists of such synonyms but, because of space limitations, does not follow up by discriminating them.

Next, essays on points of disputed usage. This is the first area in which the American dictionaries no longer present a united front. The oldest of them, WNWD, has not got usage essays, but it has the occasional comment on matters of disputed usage such as some people's objection to non-adjectival uses of due to. AHD2 has usage essays and, mirabile dictu^ so has W_s. Such a bald statement illustrates the limitations of my purely descriptive approach, because to say that AHD₂ and W₉ both have usage essays (is by no means to say that those usage essays) are similar or that 1 like them equally well. As for the British dictionaries, a difference emerges between the American-influenced ones, which have them, and autochthonous ones, which don't, although COD7 does have a D which it puts before disputed items. There is evidence that on both sides of the Atlantic usage essays have become an increasingly important feature of dictionaries. That is a phenomenon of great sociolinguistic significance, but its exploration would require a separate paper.

Next, orthographic syllabification — the syllabification of words in writing. This is a feature of the American dictionaries and of two of the three American-iafiuenced British ones (CED and GlD), but not of LDEL or the autochthonous Bri­tish dictionaries (COD, Chambers). In their Grammar of Contemporary English (p.1057), Randolph Quirk, et al. claim that there is a difference between British and American practice as regards syllable-division points, with British preferring mor­phological and etymological criteria (struct/ure) and American English phonological criteria (struc/ture). However, the word structure is syllabified as struc/ture not only by the American dictionaries in the table but also by CED and GID. So not only is the display of orthographic syllabification in dictionaries an 'American' idea, but the way it is done in British dictionaries seems to be American, too. This may lead in time to the disappearance of distinctively British syllable divisions.

Finally, biological taxa for plant and animal names, and chemical formulae for the relevant entries, are generally a feature of both the American and the British dictionaries, except that the autochthonous British, dictionaries are a bit less consistent in giving these encyclopaedic details.

What emerges from Table 1 is that the American dictionaries on the whole present much greater uniformity than the British dictionaries. Furthermore, the British dictionaries — even the American — influenced British dictionaries have not yet completely adopted the American framework. There isn't a single dictionary in the British list that has all the major design features of the American dictionaries. For example, CED hasn't got pictures or synonym essays. LDEL hasn't got pictures or orthographic syllabification. GID has got pictures, and lots of them, but for reasons of space omits the full-fledged synonym essay, contending itself with lists of near-synonyms. So there is as yet no British dictionary with all the features one associates with the American college dictionary. The British lexicographic scene is still fluid.

This method of presentation omits two important things. First, it omits evaluation. As I've already said, if two dictionaries have usage essays, that doesn't mean they're both of the same kind or both equally good. Second, it omits the one-off features: the things that one dictionary has that the other dictionaries haven't got. Thus, for example, it omits the massive encyclopaedic component in GID: the feature articles that are there as well as the 'bios' and 'geos'. From CED and W₉ it omits the

dating of entries: CED tends to date by century; W₉ tends to date by year. It omits the use of such part-of-speech labels as determiner in CED, and the way CED gives related adjectives at nouns (like Gallic at France). It omits the interesting morphological analyses that COD gives of its head words (imagist from image plus -ist): a very useful feature which Archibald Hill (1958) called for in learners' dictionaries but which, curiously enough, is found in no learners' dictionary, though it is in COD- And my table also doesn't show that GID probably gives more information about the way English is pronounced around the world than any other "ulctionary — or indeed than any other book except the three-volume work of our pronunciation editor, John Wells (1982), who was responsible for GID's pronunciation as Professor Crystal, here present, was for its usage essays.

//

I turn now from general design features to more specialised design features that will perhaps strike the lexicographer sooner than the common user. Many are of mtcrest, but I have selected for treannent in Table 2 two features that are especially relevant to a comparison of British and American lexicography. Both concern labelling. <...>

First, is linguistic formality labelled'' In other words, do these dictionaries do

'up-market' labelling or do they simply do 'down-market' labelling? All the

dictionaries label things as slang and as non-standard, sub-standard, or vulgar. All

except the august Wg label things as informal or colloquial. But what about things that

are — once again using loaded language — higher than the norm? WNWD has no

*'>rmat, but it does have a poetic, label. The other American dictionaries don't label

''trmal either. As for the British dictionaries, the picture is strange. Chambers doesn't

Label formal. COD doesn't label formaL but does label literary CED and GID are

remarkable because they do not discuss the label forma! in their front matter and yet

every once in a while things are labelled formal in one way or another. The

cv-istanding example in both ('ED and GID is parambulator, which is a formal word

91

for pram (which is a British word for baby-carriage). However, LDEL is a bit bolder, and actually discusses the label formal in its front matter. The reluctance to label things as formal may well be influenced by the feeling that the 'proper' language begins with the unmarked and includes everything above it, whereas everything below it — colloquial, slang, etc. — is worthy of labelling because it is not part of the standard language. On the other hand, I know from personal experience that for some ■"obscure reason even when you want to label formal it's extremely hard to know how to do so consistently, perhaps because it is so difficult to distinguish things that are formal from things that are — poetic, literary, rare, obsolescent, technical, etc. Why, however, should people be more interested now in labelling things formal? Perhaps because of social changes: we feel excessive formality to be as uncomfortable as ex­cessive informality. Perhaps also there has been an influence from the learners' dictionary, for which the labelling of things as formal is absolutely essential to keep foreign learners from sounding too formal: as real a danger for them as is the dangeT of sounding too informal. And the learners' dictionary is more important in British lexicography than in American lexicography. It is worth noting as well that the three British dictionaries that have the label formal — CED, GID and LDEL — are also the three with usage essays, which makes one hope that the usage essay in modern British dictionaries reflects a relatively sophisticated view of what constitutes appropriateness in language.

The second point, which is also of sociolinguistic relevance, is this: is the home \anety labelled? It goes without saying that Briticisms are labelled in the American dictionaries and Americanisms are labelled in the British dictionaries. But do the .American dictionaries label Americanisms? Do the British dictionaries label Briticisms?

Do the British dictionaries say that lift is a Briticism for elevator! Do the .American dictionaries say that elevator is an Americanism for lift? The latter do not. They don't label elevator as American, though they do label lift as British. Of the 3ntish dictionaries, four out of the five label the home variety. They label lift as

British as well as labelling elevator American. The only exception is Chambers. This suggests that British English lexicographers, and perhaps the speech community for which they stand, are aware that British English is now one of a number of Englishes around the world: they also label Australian English, Indian English, and so on. Whereas it seems (hat American English lexicographers do not yet appreciate that American English is one of a number of Englishes in the world. For them, perhaps, American English is English, and everything, else is marked. For British lexicographers both British and American English are marked, The historical reasons for this I leave to your imagination,

An apparent counter-tendency, however, is represented by the star to be found in WNWD. This star is affixed to words and senses of American origin, but not to items simply because they are American nowadays. So we have the peculiar phenomenon that not only is blizzard labelled with a star because it happens to be of American origin though now World English, but also gramophone gets a star at the same time as it gets the label chiefly British because it happens to be a word which is so far as it is used at all now is used in British rather that American English but is of American origin nonetheless. A curious situation.

It seems to me that this is not a counter-example to what I've just said about the labelling of the home variety. 1 think that WNWD's star is rather to be considered an example, if anything, of linguistic pride, not to say linguistic nationalism. WNWD is saymg, in effect, 'Look what wonderful contributions America has made to World English'. I don't think that this is the same, sociolinguistically, as what the British dictionaries are saying when they label lift as British. In fact the message is almost the opposite.

///

Having discussed overall design features and certain details of British and American dictionaries, I come now to some problems having to do specifically with Anglo-American lexicographic co-operation and what it entails. Not everything that it entails, however: I'm not going to tell you that if you're engaged in a project of this kind you have got to make sure that your handwriting is legible on the other side of the Atlantic, though God knows how much trouble has been caused by just that level of detail in real dictionary projects' But I'm going to talk about matters of greater theoretical interest.

The first such matter, in Table 3, is closely related to the topic I've just been

discussing: the labelling of the home variety. However, whereas that had to do with the

treatment of British and American English in British and American dictionaries, 1

want now to consider the inclusion of British and American English in British and

American dictionaries. How much British English is to be found in American

dictionaries and how much American English in British dictionaries? For Table 3