WORDS AND DICTIONARIES

WORDSLet us make the following distinction of terms: • orthographic word a word in writing, a sequence of letters

bounded by spaces• phonological word a word in speech, a sequence of sounds

(the boundaries of phonological words are determined by rules of syllable structure, stress, and the like)

• lexeme a word in the vocabulary of a language; it may occur as a headword in a dictionary.

A lexeme may, therefore, consist of more than one orthographic word.

MORPHEME• First of all, we need a term to denote an element of a

word: it is morpheme. Words are composed of morphemes. Many words, sometimes called ‘simple’ words, consist of only one morpheme:

• bed, dream, go, in, over, please, shallow, treat, usual, vote, whole, yellow.

• Here are some words composed of more than one morpheme:

• bedroom, dreamy, going, live-in, overland, displease, shallowest, mistreatment, usually,

• voters, wholemeal, yellowish.

LEXEMES• Lexemes that share the same spelling and pronunciation, but have a differ

ent etymology, are termed homonyms (a Greek word, meaning ‘same (homo) name (nym)’).

adds (performs additions ) ads (more than one advertisement)• Lexemes that share the same spelling, but not the same pronunciation, ar

e called homographs (from Greek, ‘same’ + ‘writing’):tear (rip) and tear (weep)• Lexemes that share the same pronunciation, but not the same spelling, ar

e called homophones (from Greek, ‘same’ + ‘sound’). Here are some homophone pairs in English:

bare/bear, gait/gate, haul/hall, leak/leek, miner/minor, paw/poor/pore/ pour, sew/sow, stake/steak, taught/taut

COMPOUNDS• Two independent lexemes have come together to form a new

lexeme with a specialised meaning, to denote some entity that is considered worth having its own ‘name’. We call such lexemes compounds.

• Sometimes compounds are written, as in the examples with war, with a space between the two elements. Other compounds are written as a single orthographic word (e.g. warhead, warlord, warpath, warship), while others have a hyphen joining the two elements (e.g. war-torn, window-shop, world-class). The current tendency is away from ‘hyphenated compounds’ towards either ‘solid compounds’ (one orthographic word) or ‘open compounds’ (two or more orthographic words).

PHRASAL LEXEMES• Phrasal lexemes have a number of common

structures, of which the ‘noun + preposition + noun’ of ward of court is one, for example. Here are some further examples of this structure:

age of consent, cash on delivery, chapel of rest,home from home, hostage to fortune, man

about town, meals on wheels, place in the sun, rite of passage, skeleton in the cupboard

SOURCES OF ENGLISH WORDS• Vocabulary of English as a number of strata• The substratum of English is Anglo-Saxon, the

collection of dialects that developed after the invading Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, colonised England following the departure of the Roman legions in the fifth century AD, driving the Celtic inhabitants to the fringes of the country in Wales and Cornwall. The language became known during this time as ‘English’, and we refer to the language during the period up to the mid-eleventh century as ‘Old English’.

• The only significant influence on the language from outside during this period was from across the North Sea, the Viking invaders, who also spoke a Germanic language, Old Norse. For a time the country was divided, with ‘Danelaw’ on the eastern side of a line from Chester to the Wash.

• Old English and Old Norse were to a great extent mutually intelligible, and the influence of Old Norse on Old English was limited.

• The greatest linguistic legacy of the Vikings was in place names, e.g. ending in –by or –thorpe; but also many words beginning with sk- come from Old Norse, as do the third person plural pronouns (they, them, their).

• Even with these additions, the vocabulary of Old English was essentially Germanic, with a handful of words from Celtic, and a number of ecclesiastical terms taken from Latin following the introduction of Roman Christianity as a result of Augustine’s mission in 597.

- The next stratum – with the Norman conquest in 1066

• The influence of this event, and its political and social consequences, on English vocabulary was monumental, though it took a couple of centuries for its full effects to be worked out.

• The language of government, administration and the law became (Norman) French; English was not used for any official written purposes; in due course many people, especially in the rising merchant class, became bilingual in English and French.

• It is estimated that in excess of 10,000 words entered English from French between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. French is a Romance language, with its origins in Latin; so a Latinate stratum was being overlaid on the Ango-Saxon substratum. Indeed, the

• substratum suffered considerable erosion, with a large proportion of the Old English vocabulary being replaced by words from the Latinate superstratum.

- The next stratum - Renaissance• A further Latinate stratum was laid during the latter half of the sixteenth

century and into the seventeenth, during the period that is called the ‘Renaissance’. It was a period in which the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome were rediscovered, admired and celebrated; their literatures republished and extensively studied, translated and imitated.

• While words had been coming into English directly from Latin, as well as via French, for some centuries, the trickle now became a flood, and many thousands of Latin words were added to English, as well as Greek words, though these often came via Latin. The Renaissance also saw the beginnings of exploration, which developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into colonisation and empire; the contact with many different cultures and languages has enriched the vocabulary of English from a multitude of sources.

HOW DO WE GET WORDS?

• There are two basic methods by which a language may increase its vocabulary.

• The first is to use the material (morphemes) available in the language already and to recombine it in new ways.

• The other is to import a word from another language, a process called, rather curiously, ‘borrowing’ – there is, after all, no intention to return the borrowed item, which is termed a ‘loanword’. Nearly all new words are added to the larger word classes, especially nouns, verbs and adjectives, with the majority being nouns.

VARIOUS WORD FORMATIONS• Compounds are formed by joining two or more root morphemes or

(classical) combining forms into a single lexeme.• neo-classical compounds: (knowledge of Latin and Greek is required): e.g.

Calligraphy (‘beautiful’ + ‘writing’); mastectomy (‘breast’ + ‘cut out’);• More than two roots: four-wheel drive, golden handshake• Two roots + suffix: dark-haired, empty-handed• Blending two roots: breakfast + lunch = brunch• Derivatives: The addition of a derivational prefix or suffix to a lexeme

forms a derivative. The lexeme may be ‘simple’ (i.e. a single morpheme), or it may be a compound, or it may be a derivative already; e.g. care-ful, landscape-(e)r, national-ity.

• Special type of derivation – backformation: babysit from babysitter, televise from television, greed from greedy.

ACRONYMS

• A minor, but nevertheless much used word formation process takes the initial letters of a phrase and creates a word, called an acronym. Either the acronym is pronounced as a normal word (e.g. AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation)), or the letters are spelled out (e.g. ATM (Automated Teller Machine), HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus)).

• Sometimes the two forms are combined, e.g. CD-ROM (Compact Disc – Read Only Memory). The acronym is usually spelt with capital letters, but a few acronyms no longer betray their origin in this way, e.g. laser (‘light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation’).

• A further type of acronym is formed by taking the first syllable of the words of a phrase, e.g. biopic (biographical picture), infotech (information technology), Ofsted (Office of Standards in Education), pixel (picture element). In the case of Ofsted, the second element (st) does not consist of the full syllable, and an x has been added to pixel to join the two syllables. These ‘syllabic acronyms’ are a relatively rare formation.

LOANWORDS

• When a word is ‘borrowed’ from another language and added to the vocabulary, it is a ‘loanword’. Some loanwords continue to betray their origins, either in their spelling or their pronunciation, or both (e.g. blitzkrieg (German), kibbutz (Hebrew), spaghetti (Italian)); while others have become naturalised (e.g. coach (Hungarian), gong (Malay), tycoon (Japanese)).

LATIN IN LAW• When a profession has sought an erudite vocabulary to mark off its

supposed area of competence, it has usually looked to the classical languages for its jargon. The law, for example, has taken many terms from Latin, such as:

• ad litem (‘in a lawsuit’), • bona fide (‘with good faith’), • corpus delicti (‘body of offence’), • ejusdem generis (‘of the same kind’), • in personam (‘against the person’), • lis pendens (‘a lawsuit pending’), • obiter dictum (‘a passing remark’ – by a judge), • prima facie (‘at first impression’), • subpoena (‘under penalty’ – i.e. to attend court), • ultra vires (‘beyond (one’s legal) power’).

GREEK IN MEDICINE

Medicine, on the other hand, has tended to look more to Greek for its jargon:

• an inflammatory disease ends in -itis (bronchitis, peritonitis),

• a surgical removal ends in -ectomy (hysterectomy, vasectomy),

• the medical care of particular groups ends in -iatrics (geriatrics, paediatrics).

BORROWING TODAYEnglish continues to enhance its vocabulary by taking in loanwords from

languages around the world. Some recent borrowing includes:

• balti (Urdu)• ciabatta (Italian)• intifada (Arabic), • juggernaut (Hindi), • karaoke (Japanese), • nouvelle cuisine (French), • ombudsman (Swedish), • paparrazi (Italian), • perestroika (Russian), • Salsa (Spanish), • tikka (Punjabi).

WORD MEANING• One of the most important tasks of a

lexicographer is to capture the ‘meaning’ of a word in a ‘definition’. The primary feature of meaning is the relation of reference between a lexeme and the entity – person, object, feeling, action, idea, quality, etc. – in the real world that the lexeme denotes.

DENOTATION VS CONNOTATION• A distinction is often drawn between the

‘denotation’ of a word and its ‘connotation’.• While the denotation is the straightforward,

neutral relation between a word and its referent, the connotation brings in the, often emotive, associations that a word may have for a speaker or a community of speakers.

• A third contributory factor to the meaning of a lexeme or a sense of a lexeme is the semantic relations it contracts with other lexemes in the vocabulary, often termed ‘sense relations’. They include:

• sameness or similarity of meaning (synonymy),• oppositeness of meaning (antonymy), • the ‘kind of’ relation (hyponymy), • and the ‘part of’ relation (meronymy).

DICTIONARIES• The dictionary is part of the cultural fabric of

our society; each major new edition warrants a review in the daily press.

• And we all take what the dictionary says as authoritative: if the dictionary says so, then it is so. Life would be impossible if the dictionary was not the final arbiter in our linguistic disputes.

WHAT IS A DICTIONARY?• A dictionary is a reference book about words. It is a

book about language. Its nearest cousin is the encyclopedia, but this is a book about things, people, places and ideas, a book about the ‘real world’, not about language. The distinction between dictionary and encyclopedia is not always easy to draw, and there are often elements of one in the other. But they do not share the same headword list – you would be unlikely to find resemble in an encyclopedia – and they do not provide the same information for the headwords that they do have in common.

TYPES OF DICTIONARIES• monolingual• bilingual

Monolingual:• those whose purpose is primarily historical• those that seek to describe the vocabulary at

a particular point or period of time.

WHAT'S IN A DICTIONARY?From the perspective of its ‘macro-structure’, there are

potentially three parts to a dictionary:• the front matter,• the body, and • the appendices. Some dictionaries do without appendices, but most

have front matter, however brief.The body of a dictionary contains an alphabetical list of

‘headwords’. Each headword is accompanied by a number of pieces of information, which together with the headword constitute the ‘entry’.

The ‘micro-structure’ of a dictionary refers to the arrangement of the information within the entries. The range and type of information within an entry will vary according to th kind of headword, but wilL typically include some or all of the following:

• Spelling: the headword indicates the normal spelling, but any variations will follow.

• Pronunciation: within rounded ( ) or slash // brackets, together with any variations.

• Inflections: if these are formed irregularly or occasion some spelling adjustment such as doubling of consonants, dropping of ‘e’ or changing ‘y’ to ‘i’.

• Word class: usually indicated by conventional abbreviations, ‘n’ for noun, ‘adj’ for adjective, etc.; verbs are also marked for ‘transitive’ (vt) or ‘intransitive’ (vi).

• Senses: where a lexeme has more than one meaning, each sense is usually numbered; where a sense, or group of senses belong to a different word class or subclass, this is indicated before the sense(s) concerned.

• Definition: each sense is given a definition, which is an explanation of its meaning.

• Examples: where the elucidation of a sense benefits from an illustrative phrase or sentence, usually given in italic type.

• Usage: where a sense is restricted in its contexts of use, an appropriate label precedes the sense concerned; if the restriction applies to all the senses of a lexeme, the label precedes any of the senses.

• Run-ons: undefined derivatives (with a word class label), idioms, phrasal verbs (if they are not included as headwords), usually in bold type.

• Etymology: conventionally in square brackets as the final item in the entry.

Some dictionaries include additional information, for example on collocation or the syntactic operation of words.

USERS AND USESThere are two sets of users whose needs have been carefully

considered and for whom dictionaries have been specifically tailored:

• children, and • learners.

• Children’s dictionaries range from the large-format work with pictures and an imaginative 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 headword list, the omission of some word senses and of information such as etymology, and definitions written in a simpler language.

• 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, pronunciation, 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.

• Therefore, 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.