[Lexicog] circular definitions

[Mike Maxwell]

MessageBenjamin Barrett wrote:
> Many native English speakers are not aware that a male
> whale is a bull and a female a cow.

That's because for many native English speakers, a male whale is _not_ a
bull, nor is a female whale a cow.  Likewise, for Herman Melville, a whale
(of whatever gender) was a warm-blooded, air breathing fish with a
horizontal tail.  But a whale is not a fish for me.

Putting this differently, the abstraction which we call the English (etc.)
language is an odd sort of thing--not even a Platonic entity.  The reality
is that an english language exists in each of our heads, and if mine is more
or less like yours, then we can more or less communicate.  (And some days
I'm convinced that 50% of the supposedly English-speaking population in fact
speaks another language.  I'll leave it to you to figure out who I mean by
that :-).)  At any rate, while the "English" (etc.--and I'll leave off the
"etc." now, if you don't mind) dictionaries we write are ostensibly about
English, in fact they only describe common englishes (or sometimes PROPER
ENGLISH).

So in the context of lexicography, I would say that terms like "bull",
"female" and even "fish", which are used in certain senses only by a part of
the population of English speakers, should be indicated as such in
dictionaries.  In many dictionaries I've seen, this is done by putting a
word like "technical" or "nautical" in parens after the sense number.
Dialectal usage is often treated in the same way, and for essentially the
same reason: it refers to a different english.

Thus, to Benjamin's citation from the AH dictionary, rather than changing
(1c), I would add:

    1d. (biology) A male whale.

(I don't really like 'biology', since I had never heard this usage, and I
have a degree in zoology.  But I can't come up with a better qualifier at 11
PM.)

But I'm straying from the original issue, which was circular definitions...

    Mike Maxwell
    Linguistic Data Consortium
    maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu




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