rewards for lexicographical research

[Benjamin Fortson]

>         But Larry Horn's enthusiastic and often helpful and enlightening
> comments demonstrate that there are lots of people out there (and on this
> list) who don't dichotomize the world this way, and who take equal delight
> and interest in practical problems of lexicography (and other things as
> well, including language teaching or civil rights) and in theoretical
> or even empirical research and analysis. Disparaging theory crucially
> overlooks the fact that much of the research currently underway in
> developing systems for voice recognition (pace Mark Mandel) and automated
> translation (anciently MT) are very pragmatically oriented toward issues
> of lexical annotation.

Personally, I didn't feel that Steve was disparaging theory in his
remarks. I believe he was simply saying that there are certain practical
concerns in making dictionaries that are the same practical concerns one
has to deal with in making books in general, that is, editorial concerns,
and that their dovetailing with lexicographical and linguistic needs lead
to interesting problems that a theoretical background in linguistics or
any other specialized field will not alone equip you for.  I myself have a
Linguistics PhD and work both full-time as a lexicographer and etymologist
and part-time as an academic teacher and researcher; I have found, like
Steve I believe, my linguistics education to be of invaluable usefulness
for some aspects of my lexicographic work, but a good deal of the rest of
that work really lies in other domains.

On top of that, of course, is the art to writing definitions, which can
not really be taught formally (aside from basic considerations like "make
sure the genus is the same part of speech as the word you're defining"),
but must be carefully honed to perfection by each individual
lexicographer. Some, as we all know (think Noah Webster) are born
definers; the rest of us aren't, and can only improve on the job, and all
the theoretical training in the world is not going to make one good at
defining.

Ben