لخّصلي

7.3Accessibility
Let us consider first what may be involved in the dictionary lookup process.
Scholfield (1999: 13–14), whose focus is on language learners consulting a dic
tionary to find out about the meaning of a word, suggests that there are ‘five
main steps’:
1the learner identifies a vocabulary problem that is a word or phrase whose
meaning is unknown or uncertain
2the learner makes the decision to use a dictionary to solve the problem,
rather than, or in addition to, other possible means
3he or she has to find an entry for the wordform or phrase being sought
4the right specific entry or part of an entry has to be located
5the information about meaning that has been obtained has to be exploited.
The points at which accessibility becomes particularly relevant are steps 3 and 4,
which relate to the ‘macrostructure’ and the ‘microstructure’ of the dictionary
respectively.
A dictionary’s macrostructure refers to what constitutes an entry in a diction
ary and how the entries are arranged. We assume that a dictionary page has two
(sometimes three) columns, and that entries follow each other in alphabetical
order. Compare the headword list (from pros) for the following two dictionaries
of similar size and published within three years of each other shown in Table
7.1.
In this brief headword list, Chambers has only one item that is not included in
LDEL (prosauropod), whereas LDEL has thirteen that are not in the Chambers
headword list. However, apart from the first two the abbreviation pros. and
the prefix pros- they are all contained in Chambers, though not as headwords.
The macrostructure of the two dictionaries differs most obviously in the deci
sions about which items feature as headwords. Chambers nests all derivatives; so
prosaism and prosaist are both within the entry for prosaic, proscription is under
proscribe, prosecution under prosecute, and so on. Similarly, the noun, verb and
adjective uses of prose, which have separate headwords in LDEL, are all dealt Table 7.1
Chambers (1988)LDEL (1991)
pros
pros
prosaicprosaic
prosaism
prosaist
prosauropod
prosceniumproscenium
proscenium arch
prosciuttoprosciutto
proscribeproscribe
proscription
prose1
prose
2
prose
3
prose
prosectorprosector
prosecuteprosecute
prosecuting attorney
prosecution
prosecutor
proselyteproselyte
proselytism
proselytize
prosencephalonprosencephalon
with in the one entry in Chambers, as is the more usual practice. LDEL puts its
abbreviations, like pros. in the headword sequence; Chambers collects them to
gether in an appendix. Such macrostructure decisions affect the accessibility of
headwords, and so the search in Scholfield’s Step 3. All the words beginning
with the combining form neur(o)-, for example, are under a single headword in
Chambers, but each has headword status in LDEL; arguably, it is easier to find a
word like neuroleptic in LDEL, by scanning down the headword list, than in
Chambers, which requires perusal of a continuous paragraph, even though the
lexemes themselves are in bold typeface.
A dictionary’s microstructure refers to the layout and organisation of the
individual entry. Compare the following entries for nest from Chambers and
COD10:
nestnest, n. a structure prepared for egg-laying, brooding, and nursing, or
as a shelter: a place of retreat, resort, residence or lodgment: a den: a com
fortable residence: a group of machine-guns in a position fortified or screened
by sandbags or the like: a place where anything teems, prevails, or is fos
tered: the occupants of a nest, as a brood, a swarm, a gang: a set of things (as
boxes, tables) fitting one within another: a set of buildings, as advance
factories, divided into blocks and units: an accumulation: a tangled mass 80Users and uses
v.i. to build or occupy a nest: to go bird’snesting. –v.t. and v.i. to lodge,
settle. –n.nest’er one who builds a farm or homestead on land used for
grazing cattle (U.S. hist.; derog.): a nestbuilder. –nest’-egg an egg, real or
sham, left or put in a nest to encourage laying: something laid up as the
beginning of an accumulation: money saved; nest’ing-box a box set up
for birds to nest in; nest’ing-place.–feather one’s nest see feather.
[O.E. nest; Ger. Nest, L. nidus.]
(Chambers)
nest • n. 1 a structure or place made or chosen by a bird for laying eggs and
sheltering its young. s
s
a place where an animal or insect breeds or shelters.
a snug or secluded retreat. s
a bowlshaped object likened to a bird’s
nest. 2 a place filled with undesirable people or things: a nest of spies.3 a set
of similar objects of graduated sizes, fitting together for storage. •v. 1 use
or build a nest. 2fit (an object or objects) inside a larger one. 3 (especially
in computing and linguistics) place in a hierarchical arrangement, typically
in a lower position.
DERIVATIVES nestful n. (pl.-fuls).
– ORIGIN OE nest, of Gmc origin.
nest box (also nesting box) •n. a box provided for a bird to nest in.
nest egg•n. 1 a sum of money saved for the future. 2 a real or artificial
egg left in a nest to induce hens to lay there.
nester•n.a bird nesting in a specified manner or place: a scarce nester in
Britain.
(COD10)
Although the exact typefaces are not reproduced, the entries are replicas in all
essential respects. Chambers represents an entry style that was reflected in the
COD up to the seventh edition (1982), while COD10 represents a double shift
from COD7, in the direction of a clearer microstructure and enhanced accessi
bility. The major differences are the following:
•word classes marked by ‘•’ and a bold abbreviation (n, v) in COD10, com
pared with an italic n, v.i. etc. in Chambers
•COD10 has no pronunciation transcription for ‘simple’ words like nest;
Chambers has a respelling system (see Chapter 9)
•senses are numbered in COD10, with subsenses marked by ‘
s
’; whereas
Chambers divides senses with a colon (:)
•derivatives requiring their own definition are separate headwords in COD10,
while remaining nested under the root word in Chambers
•undefined derivatives are clearly marked in COD10
•etymology is on a separate line, marked by the word ‘ORIGIN’, in COD10;
while Chambers has etymology in the traditional square brackets at the end
of the entry Scholfield’s Step 4 is probably easier to complete in COD10 than in Chambers.
Even so, the user still has to complete Step 5, the task of ‘interpreting the
information given in the entry’ (Béjoint 2000: 156).
ECED attempts to overcome part of the problem of location of information
by including ‘quick definitions’ in bold capitals at the beginning of each sense of
polysemous lexemes, a technique similar to that used by some learners’ diction
aries (Chapter 11). For example, the entry for ladder reads:
1 DEVICE WITH RUNGS TO CLIMB ON a portable piece of equip
ment with rungs fixed to sides made of metal, wood, or rope, used for
climbing up or down 2 PATH TO ADVANCEMENT a series of hier
archical levels on which somebody moves up or down within an organiza
tion or society o She joined the firm at a fairly low level but quickly moved up the
ladder. 3 LINE OF MISSING STITCHES IN TIGHTS a vertical line
of stitches that have come undone in tights, a stocking, or a knitted gar
ment, leaving only the horizontal stitches in place 4 LIST OF RANKED
PLAYERS a list of contestants in an ongoing sports or games competition,
arranged according to ability
The aim is for the user to run their eye down the entry, reading only the ‘quick
definitions’, in order to locate more easily the specific sense being looked for.
There are, though, conventions of dictionary microstructure that a user must
become familiar with: what a headword is, normally a transcription of pronun
ciation, irregular inflections, division of the entry into word classes if relevant,
identification of different senses, the wording of definitions, the placement of
derivatives, phrases and idioms, etymology usually in square brackets at the end.
Then, it is the rare dictionary that does not utilise a degree of abbreviation, at
least for the word classes, and usually for the ‘transitive’ (v.t.) and ‘intransitive’
(vi.) uses of verbs, as well the languages referred to in the etymology (O.E. for
‘Old English’, Ger. for ‘German’, L. for ‘Latin’, Gmc for ‘Germanic’). In the
Preface to the first edition of COD (1911), the editors, F.W. and H.G. Fowler,
aimed to save space ‘by the severest economy of expression amounting to the
adoption of telegraphese that readers can be expected to put up with’. Ninety
years later, dictionary users can be expected to put up with far less abbreviation
than their forebears, and in some dictionaries (e.g., NODE) abbreviation is
deliberately kept to a minimum.
Even with improvements in the macro- and microstructure of dictionaries in
recent years, to make information more readily accessible, the user must expect
to develop reference skills in order to become an efficient user of dictionaries.
The evidence from studies of dictionary use is that few users read the front
matter of their dictionary, which explains how the dictionary is structured,
how users may locate various items of information, what the various labels and
abbreviations mean, and what special features the dictionary contains. Ingeneral
terms, users must develop skills in finding the appropriate headwords the base
form of an inflected word, where a compound or derived word is entered 82Users and uses
under which headword to look for a phrase or idiom. Also, users must be
familiar with entry structure, the division into word classes, the principles of
sense division, the wording of definitions, the contribution of examples, and so
on. Many have argued for training in dictionary use to be given in schools and
universities, rather than leaving it to chance and native wit (Hartmann 2001: 92,
Béjoint 2000: 168). But is there perhaps a fault in the dictionaries themselves?
7.4Record or reference?
When we take the user’s perspective, issues of accessibility are naturally to the
fore, and the concentration is on the dictionary as a reference manual. But
‘dictionaries must be faithful recorders of the language’ (Chambers Preface). We
saw in Chapter 4 how dictionaries grew into the role of being a record of the
language, and in Chapter 5 how the OED compilers interpreted that role in
historical terms. In Chapter 3, we argued for the dictionary as a linguistic de
scription complementary to the grammar, the latter dealing with the general
rules of sentence structure, and the former with the operation of individual
lexical items as well as with the overall structure of the vocabulary of a language.
Within its size and scope a dictionary is a lexical description. It specifies the
lexical items that the vocabulary contains; it aims to be comprehensive, in the
sense discussed in 7.1; it gives for each lexical item that it identifies a complete
lexical account spelling, pronunciation, inflections, derivations, meanings,
usage, origin that describes its idiosyncratic operation (Chapter 3). This is the
sense in which a dictionary is expected to be a ‘faithful recorder’ of the lan
guage. The information that should be included is more or less given (Hudson
1988; Ilson 1991); how it should be presented is a matter of convention, tweaked
by imaginative development and innovation on the part of dictionary compil
ers, editors and publishers.
The consequence of dictionaries’ recording function is that vast amounts of
information in any dictionary remain unconsulted by anyone except, perhaps,
the most assiduous dictionary scholar. Conventional native-speaker dictionaries
are attempting to perform simultaneously two functions that may be in conflict
with each other: to provide a lexical description, and to provide a source of
ready reference to satisfy the needs of various types of user. Is there an argument
for a range of different types of dictionary, to fulfil the different functions and
user needs, just as there is a range of different types of grammar book, from
reference to pedagogical?
The most popular dictionary in Germany is the Duden Rechtschreibung, now
in its twenty-second edition (2000). It is essentially a spelling dictionary, with
indications of alternative spellings, syllabification, and inflections; but also, for
less familiar words and phrases, it gives brief definitions, synonyms or examples
of usage, as well as pronunciation and language of origin for loanwords. So it
fulfils the two basic needs of dictionary users: a guide to spelling, and an expla
nation of ‘hard’ words. No popular dictionary for English follows this format.
English has specialist spelling dictionaries (e.g. West 1964), and it has specialist dictionaries for the terminology of subject disciplines and particular topics, from
archaeology to zoology; but it has no regular dictionary of the type represented
by the Duden.
ECED, on the basis of its user research (7.2) makes some provision for meet
ing the spelling needs of its target users (mainly students). It includes common
misspellings of words in its alphabetical listing of headwords, but in grey type
and with a line through; the correct spelling is then given beside it, e.g.
preperation incorrect spelling of preparation
It also includes notes entitled ‘SPELLCHECK’ after words that are pronounced
the same (i.e. homophones), e.g. here and hear, as well as ‘usage’ notes for pairs
that are frequently confused, e.g. complement and compliment.
The dictionary in the electronic medium (see 6.7) offers the possibility of
allowing the user to choose which types of information about headwords will
be displayed on any lookup occasion. The OED2 on CDROM has built in a
number of options of this kind. The user can choose whether to have the
quotations displayed or not, and there are ‘switches’ to activate the display of
‘pronunciation’, ‘spellings’ (i.e. form history), and ‘etymology’. If all the options
are turned off, the display offers only the definitions and usage labels for the
numbered senses of a lexeme. The Oxford Talking Dictionary has a more limited
set of switches: the quotations can be excluded, and the thesaurus facility is
activated by a switch. Electronic dictionaries generally divide their display into
a headword list window and a dictionary entry window, and each can be scrolled
separately. The headword list window operates in part like a spelling dictionary,
except that derivatives, compounds and so on that are nested in dictionary
entries may not be included in the list. The electronic medium does, though,
open up possibilities for selective display of dictionary information that have not
yet been fully exploited.
7.5Learners
There are two sets of users whose needs have been carefully considered and for
whom dictionaries have been specifically tailored: children, and learners. Chil
dren’s dictionaries range from the large-format work with pictures and an im
aginative use of colour, aimed at those just beginning to learn to read, to school
dictionaries that look like the adult version, except with a more selective head
word list, the omission of some word senses and of information such as etymol
ogy, and definitions written in a simpler language. We could examine more
closely the range of children’s dictionaries, but our focus here will be on dic
tionaries aimed at learners of English as a foreign or second language. We discuss
these dictionaries in detail in Chapter 11; in the context of the present chapter,
we look just at the reference needs of this group.
A learner, or indeed a native speaker, may consult a dictionary when engaged
in one of two broad types of language task. On the one hand, a learner may be engaged in the task of reading or listening, and they encounter a word or phrase
that makes no sense to them and whose meaning they cannot deduce from the
context: the dictionary is used as an aid to ‘decoding’ the item read or heard. On
the other hand, a learner may be engaged in the task of writing or preparing to
speak, and they do not necessarily need to find an unknown word, but rather to
discover how a known word may be used in the appropriate context: the dic
tionary is used as an aid to ‘encoding’ acceptable sentences and texts. For a
native speaker, spelling is the main encoding purpose that they might consult a
dictionary for; whereas learners may need to find out about spelling, pronuncia
tion, inflections, how a word fits into grammatical structure, what other words
can appropriately accompany it (its collocations), and whether there are any
social or cultural restrictions on its usage.
Dictionaries for learners, therefore, need to consider not only their decoding
needs, which are not vastly different from those of native speakers, but more
particularly their encoding needs. This means that learners’ dictionaries need to
contain more explicit, more comprehensive and more systematic information
about the syntactic and lexical operation of words than a dictionary for native
speakers. Arguably, this information should be contained in any dictionary that
purports to be an accurate and comprehensive lexical description (Hudson 1988),
but in practice it is precisely in these areas that in native speaker dictionaries the
information is scantiest and least systematic (see Chapter 9). Besides, as we
noted earlier, it is not just a matter of containing the information, it is also a
matter of presenting the information in such a way that it is readily accessible
and takes account of users’ prior knowledge and reference skills (Jackson 1995).
The early learners’ dictionaries, such as H.E. Palmer’s A Grammar of English
Words (1938) or the precursor to the OALD, A.S. Hornby et al.’s Idiomatic and
Syntactic English Dictionary (1942), concentrated, as their titles suggest, on pro
viding accurate and systematic information about the grammatical operation of
words. The subsequent history of learners’ dictionaries (Cowie 1999) shows the
development and elaboration of that purpose, not only in grammar but also in
phraseology and collocation, with an increasing attention more recently on
making the information more readily accessible and usable. This has been achieved
in a number of ways. For example, the early editions of OALD presented infor
mation about the grammatical operation of verbs by means of a set of codes
based on a system of ‘verb patterns’ developed by Hornby. Each sense of a verb
was coded (e.g. ‘VP6, VP15, VP21’). The regular user of the dictionary would
learn which patterns were represented by the commonly occurring codes, and
could look the less familiar ones up in the guide to the dictionary in the front
matter. The coded information was usually supported by illustrative examples,
so that the user could see a typical context for the word in the given sense. It
became clear over time that, while language teachers may have made good use
of the grammatical codes, many student users of the dictionary did not make the
effort to learn the system and relied largely on the examples. In later editions of
OALD the coding system has been abandoned; the grammatical information is
presented in a more accessible form, e.g. by means of formulae such as ‘~sth (tosb)’; and more attention is paid to ensuring that the examples provide a suitable
model.
As we shall see in Chapter 11, learners’ dictionaries have developed in more
varied ways than just in the presentation of grammatical information. Entry
structure has in some cases been substantially revised, information and advice on
usage is incorporated, various types of additional material is included. Much of
the innovation has been in response to the perceived needs of this particular user
group, so that the learner’s dictionary has in many respects moved away from
the conventions of the native speaker dictionary (Rundell 1998).
7.6Further reading
It is useful to read the prefaces and other front matter to a number of diction
aries, as well as the blurb on their dust jackets, to gain an idea of howdictionaries
are presenting themselves to their potential users. Chapters 4 and 5 of Henri
Béjoint’s Modern Lexicography (2000) discuss the aims of dictionaries, their func
tions in society, and the reference needs of their users. A ‘user perspective’ is
also provided by Chapter 6 of Reinhard Hartmann’s Teaching and Researching
Lexicography (2001). Bo Svensén discusses dictionary users in relation to types of
dictionary in Chapter 2 of his Practical Lexicography (1993).