27.561, Review: History of Ling; Lexicography; Semantics: Kaminska (2014)

Thu Jan 28 19:01:37 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-561. Thu Jan 28 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.561, Review: History of Ling; Lexicography; Semantics: Kaminska (2014)

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Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2016 14:01:19
From: Traci Nagle [tcnagle at indiana.edu]
Subject: A History of the Concise Oxford Dictionary

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-4694.html

AUTHOR: Malgorzata Anna  Kaminska
TITLE: A History of the Concise Oxford Dictionary
SERIES TITLE: Lodz Studies in Language - Band 34
PUBLISHER: Peter Lang AG
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Traci C. Nagle, Indiana University Bloomington

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The plethora of scholarship on Oxford University Press’s flagship Oxford
English Dictionary (OED) might lead one to forget that OUP publishes a legion
of other, smaller-scale dictionaries, from dictionaries of regional English
(American, Canadian, Australian, etc.) to dictionaries of etymology, idioms,
slang, and quotations. The making of the Concise Oxford Dictionary has been
discussed in a number of biographies of its founding compilers, the brothers
Henry W. and Francis G. Fowler (e.g., Burchfield 1979, McMorris 2002), but it
has not previously been the subject of such intensive study as is presented in
Małgorzata Anna Kamińska’s A History of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD,
Peter Lang, 2014). Based on Kamińska’s doctoral thesis of the same title
(2010, Opole University), this work presents a close examination of two sets
of representative samples of the dictionary’s entries. The first sample, which
comprises 50 consecutive headwords from each of six different letters of the
alphabet, is examined in terms of the dictionary’s macrostructure—that is, the
words chosen for inclusion and their ordering principles. The second sample
comprises 5 full entries from each of those six alphabetical runs, and it is
the basis for the exploration of the dictionary’s microstructure, or the
substance and structure of its individual entries, such as definitions,
etymologies, pronunciation, and usage labels. The author refers frequently to
the secondary literature on lexicographical structure and practice and refers
to some correspondence with prior and current editors of the COD. However, the
bulk of the information she presents is drawn directly from the printed pages
(including the editors’ prefaces) of the eleven editions of the COD published
between 1911 and 2004.

The Introduction of this book outlines the author’s methodology and previews
the structure of the analysis that will follow, describing the way in which
elements of the macrostructure and microstructure are to be evaluated and
compared. The relatively brief Part 1 of the book outlines the origins and
history of the COD, which was created initially as an offshoot of the OED but
in its tenth edition became based on an entirely different OUP dictionary.
Part 1 also presents brief biographies of the COD’s various editors. The real
substance of the book is contained in Part 2, which presents in eleven
chapters a meticulous chronological examination of the edition-by-edition
changes perceptible in the macro- and microstructure of the dictionary. These
sections cover the front and back matter, the word list, the form of the
entries, definitions, senses, syntagmatic/paradigmatic elements, etymology,
pronunciation, usage labelling, and function. A 125-page appendix presents the
entire corpus of dictionary entries upon which the book’s analysis is based—an
impressive quantity of data to have analyzed.

The author discusses the effect that different approaches to
dictionary-writing have on the user of a dictionary. For example, the Fowlers’
telegraphic style of definition-writing, which aimed at the most severe
conservation of space, required significant reconstructive work on the part of
the reader. The first edition’s definition of “burn down” (as when a campfire
or oil lamp is reaching the end of its life) reads “less vigorously as fuel
fails.” As Kamińska points out, this extremely pared-down defining style
required the reader “to add the head of the compound being defined [in this
example, ‘burn’],” which worked only to the extent that “the head of the
defined unit was defined earlier in the entry” (p. 102). Beginning in the
fifth edition the editors of the COD began to move away from this telegraphic
style toward more transparent defining. Changes in the guidance given on
pronunciation also changed dramatically over time, from the original editors’
offering of pronunciation information only for “words considered difficult for
the user,” to the presentation of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
transcriptions for all headwords in the eighth and ninth editions, and back to
limited IPA-based information “only for words which could be tricky for the
native speaker” (p. 179). This strategy was convenient for the editors,
Kamińska states, but not necessarily optimal for the dictionary’s users.

In her three pages of “Conclusions” to the book, the author points out that
the primary effect of the editorial changes over the course of a century of
revision was to make the dictionary more user-friendly and more prescriptive
(as measured by its increased offering of usage notes).

EVALUATION

Of interest primarily to scholars and practitioners of lexicography,
Kamińska’s volume provides exhaustive detail about the changes in entries
across eleven editions of the COD. Her method is comprehensive and offers a
model for other scholars interested in this type of close study. (Indeed, the
method she used was identically applied by Mariusz Kamiński in his History of
the Chambers Dictionary. The two authors appear to have shared the same
dissertation advisor.) Unfortunately, Kamińska’s  writing offers few if any
original insights into the practice of lexicography in general or as applied
to the COD, nor does it provide any revealing information about the evolving
COD that could not be gleaned directly from the editors’ prefaces (which she
cites frequently). The sections in Part 2 are heavy on detail but rather light
on analysis and reflection. For instance, the discussion in Chapter 5 of the
changes made in each edition’s front and back matter mentions the appearance,
disappearance, and reappearance of the publication date on the title page, but
offers no proposals for why the date might be omitted in some editions and
included in others. (One reason to omit a prominent display of the publication
date, one might surmise, would be to deflect cursory accusations that the
dictionary is out-of-date.) Nor, alongside the fact that the Fowler brothers’
names were dropped from the title page of the 1999 tenth edition, is it
mentioned that this change coincided with the complete reconstruction of the
dictionary, from being drawn since the Fowlers’ time from the OED, to being
based starting with the tenth edition on the New Oxford Dictionary of English
(Pearsall, ed., 1998). The six pages that comprise Chapter 14, “Function,”
offer a reflection on the effects on the user of the changes detailed in the
preceding 150 pages. Given that, except perhaps for the OED, every Oxford
dictionary is written with a particular type of user in mind, this chapter
would have seemed the obvious place for the author to step back and evaluate
the changes documented thus far. That she concludes this discussion in only
six pages was disappointing to this reader. Indeed, her book of nearly 200
pages offers a concluding chapter only 3 pages long; this fact alone
illustrates that the book, in both the micro view and the macro view, is heavy
on data presentation and light on insight.

The comprehensive presentation of comparative data, however, does offer the
interested reader an engrossing illustration of the changes in dictionary
practice over a long period of time. Contrasts between prescriptiveness and
descriptiveness; between “proper” scholarly vocabulary (which was often
“archaic, rare and difficult,” p. 205) and modern, familiar terms; and between
the historical/chronological arrangement of senses used by the OED and the
ordering of senses within entries by their currency can be clearly seen in the
tabular presentations of the appendix.

REFERENCES

Burchfield, Robert. 1979. The Fowlers: Their Achievements in Lexicography and
Grammar. Surrey: Hartfield.

Kamińska, Malgorzata. 2010. A History of the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Opole University (Opole, Poland).

Kamiński, Mariusz. 2013. A History of the Chambers Dictionary. Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter.

McMorris, Jenny. 2002. The Warden of English: The Life of H. W. Fowler.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pearsall, Judy, ed. 1998. The New Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Traci Nagle, who holds master's degrees in linguistics and in English, is a
doctoral candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University,
Bloomington. She specializes in phonology, phonetics, the languages of South
Asia, Indian English, and lexicography, especially the lexicography of Indian
English and of the Anglo-Indian dictionary Hobson-Jobson (1886).

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