12.2 Dictionaries

12.2.1 The construction (macrostructure/microstructure) of dictionaries and their evidential base

Since the late twentieth century, the construction of dictionaries has been seen in terms of two complementary structures: macrostructure (the itemized inventory of words included), and microstructure (the structural template in which information on each word is provided at its entry). Over the course of centuries both the overall macrostructure and the microstructure of entries in English dictionaries has steadily enlarged, in response to the needs of the times and different kinds of user. The dictionaries published show waves of interest in general and specialized vocabulary, in common nouns and proper names, in providing purely lexical information and adding encyclopaedic information about the items listed. Through all these shifts in focus and content, the alphabetical macrostructure has proved accommodating and provided easy access to individual items, despite the arbitrary juxtapositions of items within it. The alphabetical macrostructure has also supported alternative approaches to the lemmatization of words:

• clustering morphologically related words, e.g. fossil, fossiliferous, fossilize together in a single entry with the derived forms as secondary headwords or runons, as in the Oxford dictionary tradition;

• splitting morphologically related words over successive individual entries, so that each one is presented in a separate entry, as in Merriam–Webster’s dictionaries.

These different approaches to the construction of the macrostructure are informally referred to as ‘lumping’ and ‘splitting’. They are extremes in terms of macrostructural design, and modern dictionaries usually find a compromise in between. The dictionary’s policy on lumping and splitting affects the microstructure of individual entries, which are consistently larger or smaller accordingly. That apart, the microstructure of monolingual dictionaries has steadily evolved from the minimalism of the earliest monolingual English glossaries, to the greatly enlarged entries of Johnson’s dictionary (1755) and the first edition of the OED (1884–1928). The interplay between macrostructure and microstructure is also reflected in the dictionary’s perspective on the lexicon: synchronic or diachronic. The synchronic dictionary lists only words deemed current for the contemporary reader (as in Cawdrey’s list of ‘usuall’ words), whereas the macrostructure of the diachronic dictionary includes obsolete words known from the earlier literature of the language. Complementing this, the diachronic dictionary orders word senses/definitions in line with their historical development (as shown by the citational record), and showing whether their usage continues or has ceased. In the microstructure of synchronic dictionary, the order of word senses is not usually historical, but according to their notional generality or specificity – hence the practice of defining undertaker first as ‘one who undertakes’ and then as ‘one who manages funeral arrangements for another party’. An alternative principle for ordering senses is to prioritize high-frequency over lower frequency usages – a system that can be supported by referring to computer corpora, and applied in recent pedagogical dictionaries. Between the macrostructure and microstructure, lexicographers since Nielsen (2003) have noted as mediostructure the various intermediate structures of the dictionary, which serve as a bridge between the alphabetical macrostructure, and the details of the microstructure in individual entries. The commonest form of mediostructure is the cross-referencing signalled within the microstructure that can take readers to an alternative word, name, spelling or form of the headword, as in:

throve a past tense of thrive

Cross-referencing is the sole function of ‘blind’ entries, used as place-holders for words which are detailed in other entries:

Ulysses butterfl y ⇒ mountain blue butterfl y

While print dictionaries have long included cross-referencing, many other kinds of mediostructure can be built into online dictionaries. They can include links to supplementary lexical information within the website, such as hierarchical diagrams that show sense relations among word sets (e.g. hyponymy, meronymy), the grammatical paradigms in which word forms vary (e.g. irregular verbs), and computerized concordances extracted from corpora showing the headword as a keyword in context. Some lexicographers (Nielsen 2003) also regard the external links from an online dictionary to resources held elsewhere on the internet (e.g. formal standards), as part of the dictionary’s mediostructure. These extensions to the information provided to the user of online dictionaries underscore their increasing role as interfaces to the encyclopaedic world of the internet. Since Johnson’s dictionary, citational evidence from outside sources has been provided within large monolingual dictionaries as a way of validating the individual senses of words, and illustrating their grammatical use in sentences and types of discourse. In the diachronic Oxford English Dictionary (OED), this citational evidence became the backbone of the word’s history, from which its senses over the course of time were induced. It was the work of many hands (see OED’s Historical Introduction, Section VII), though nowadays largely superseded by the availability of computerized databases of printed text (such as the British National Corpus) or data extracted from the internet. Linguistic corpora have been used by the major dictionary publishing houses since the 1980s, starting with Collins publishers’ ‘Bank of English’, and the Oxford Text Archive. Used appropriately, these sources provide both frequency information, and lively citations from different kinds of texts to illustrate more and less formal styles of usage. The polysemy and collocational behaviour of very common words is more easily analysed on concordances derived from corpus data, as demonstrated by Sinclair (1991) with the many uses of of. The ready availability of citational evidence from digitized sources has freed dictionary-makers from their dependence on preexisting works, and standing on the shoulders of their predecessors, while avoiding plagiarism. However this does not lessen the need for lexicographic scholarship in interpreting lexical raw material.