Review ArticleA survey of current textbooks of lexicography

Gergely Pethő

Henri Béjoint: Modern Lexicography. An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xii + 276 pages.Sidney I. Landau: Dictionaries. The Art and Craft of Lexicography. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xvi + 478 pages.R. R. K. Hartmann: Teaching and Researching Lexicography. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001. xii + 212 pages.Stefan Engelberg / Lothar Lemnitzer: Lexikographie und Wörterbuchbenutzung. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001. x + 278 pages.Howard Jackson: Lexicography. An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. x + 190 pages.Piet van Sterkenburg (ed.): A Practical Guide to Lexicography. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. xii + 460 pages.

If one examines how the supply of lexicography textbooks has developed recently, it becomes obvious that lexicography as a theoretical discipline must have established itself as a subject that is regularly taught at universities. Whereas a fewyears ago the choice of such textbooks was very limited, by nowseveral of the major linguistics publishers offer one. Remarkably, the contents of these books are not as uniform as one would expect on the basis of one’s experience with textbooks of other fields. For example, you normally assume that a new general introduction to syntax, morphology or formalsemantics will treat mostly the same topics as all the others, and will differ from these mainly in terms of quality, level ofattention given to particular issues and pedagogical value. By contrast the new lexicography textbooks are rather diverse in every possible respect, without clearly indicating (in their blurbs, their forewords etc.) where their own focus lies and what kinds of reader they aim to address. Therefore, the main aim of this survey is not just to introduce these books one by one, but also to compare them and to establish what their strong and their rather less strong sides are in relation to their competitors.First I will summarize each of the books and then compare theircontents and possible uses. Throughout I will refer to the books discussed by naming their authors (in small capitals).

1. BÉJOINTThis book is the oldest one in terms of date of publication (2000), and, although this is indicated nowhere but in the publication data and the preface, it is actually a reprint of an even earlier edition which appeared under a different title:Tradition and innovation in modern English dictionaries (1994). In comparisonto this earlier edition it contains just two minor additions: the preface (two pages) and an „update on references, 1994-2000”. The latter is just one and a half page long, which is rather unimpressive if one considers the huge amount of important publications that appeared during these 7 years in the relevant books, journals and conference proceedings.That this text is ten years old is quite apparent, since it does not discuss one of the most popular recent topics in lexicography: electronic dictionaries. It does not reflect adequately the role which large corpora play in today’s lexicography either. Apart from these shortcomings it is a solid and well-written introduction.Its first chapter briefly discusses the question how dictionary can be defined, what the structure and goals of a dictionary are, which main types can be distinguished etc.The second chapter, „The lexicographical scene of English-speaking countries” introduces the main American and British monolingual dictionaries that were available at the time of writing, i.e. at the beginning of the 1990s. It should be notedthat although this might not seem to be a serious problem at first blush, it is in fact rather unfortunate that the more recent editions could not be considered. The other introductions, especially LANDAU and ENGELBERG/LEMNITZER, emphasisethat a distinct evolution could be observed in practical lexicography during the 90s, including such aspects as the recognition of the importance of user-friendliness, more and more reliance on corpus data and, as a consequence, a shift from the more traditional prescriptive-style dictionaries (which have been dominant especially in the USA) to more descriptive ones etc. These trends could not yet be observed when Béjoint wrote his book. Otherwise, this overview adequately demonstrates the differences between American and British lexicography, as it concentrates on the most typical products of these two „lexicographic scenes”: the general monolingual dictionary in the USA and the monolingual learner’s

dictionary in Britain. Other types of dictionaries receive muchless attention.Chapter 3, „The historical origins of the general-purpose dictionary”, examines the general trends in the history of dictionary-writing in a very concise manner, concentrating on the substance of these trends rather than on the individual dictionaries which represented them. It summarizes stages of development like the early dictionaries of hard words, then those dictionaries which should record the whole language, thereby fulfilling a normative function, and finally the present descriptive dictionaries.Chapter 4, „The general-purpose dictionaries and society”, examines the expectations of the public towards dictionaries. It demonstrates convincingly that the way dictionaries are madetoday depends to a very large extent on the users’ expectations. These expectations are mostly irrational, e.g. non-linguists tend to imagine that print dictionaries are basically versions of a single ideal Dictionary, which containsthe absolute truth on what words mean, which uses of words (or even which words as such) are acceptable and which are wrong etc. It is demonstrated on the standard example of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary that although actual dictionaries impose a norm on language rather than reflect the objectively given norms and although the creators of dictionaries are absolutely aware that the above-mentioned public view is fundamentally mistaken, they have to adhere to the normative tradition and conform to the users’ expectations or risk the financial failure of the dictionary project. This chapter also includes an interesting examination of how directly the choice of lemmas and the phrasing of definitions reflect the society in which the dictionary was created, by looking at the treatment of taboo words and political terms as well as sexist definitions.Chapter 5, „What are general-purpose dictionaries really for”, presents the results of the well-known studies by Barnhart, Quirk etc. which aimed to establish what kinds of information the users actually consult their dictionaries for, and how theyproceed when they try to look up some information. It is shown that modern lexicographers try to determine very consciously how reference works have to be improved to respond to the users’ needs.

Chapter 6, „The linguistic traditions of lexicography”, first briefly examines the relationship between linguistics as an academic discipline and practical lexicography, i.e. the writing of dictionaries and then summarises some prominent traditional assumptions that guide the process of dictionary-writing, e.g. that all words have meanings, word meanings are discrete, definitions must not be circular etc. These assumptions are briefly explained, illustrated by one or two examples, and criticised if necessary.The final chapter turns to two linguistic topics which the author assumes to play an important role in the creation of future dictionaries: the treatment of idioms and of polysemy. Firstly, he outlines recent publications on idiomaticity and collocations (particularly John Sinclair’s famous writings on these issues), which suggest that the syntagmatic delimitation of lexical items as it is traditionally done in lexicography isgenerally inadequate. It is claimed that much more attention should be paid to multiword units both during the compilation of a dictionary and in theoretical linguistic work. And secondly, he mentions recent ideas in lexical semantics which have been proposed as possible solutions to problems of the treatment of lexical ambiguity, in particular the monosemy/contextual variation approach, the regular/systematic polysemy approach, and cognitive semantics/prototype theory. Heassumes that these could lead to dictionary treatments of multiple word meanings which would be substantially different than the previous ones.Overall, BÉJOINT serves as an entertaining, compact and reliablegeneral introduction to dictionaries. It mentions many topics which someone who is interested in dictionaries should be awareof, but at the same time the discussions remain quite simple (although they could hardly be described as superficial). For someone who is already well acquainted with lexicography, it should still be interesting, since it contains many interestingthoughts and examples. On the other hand, as a textbook it is not of much use for anything other than a general introduction.In particular, it cannot be used as a teaching material in university courses which aim to acquaint students with the techniques of dictionary use or the education of such techniques; and neither (at least as the primary textbook) to teach practical lexicography or metalexicography. Importantly,

it does not say anything about bilingual dictionaries, so its usefulness for foreign language teachers is even more limited.An interesting aspect of BÉJOINT, however, is the extensive reliance on French literature on lexicography, which is almost completely missing from the other textbooks. This should make it especially worth reading for metalexicographers who do not read French but are interested in the topics that the rather rich French tradition is concerned with.The major negative point of this book is that, as already mentioned, the presentation of the current state of lexicography is clearly outdated. Whereas it provides a very good overview of the state of the art about 10 years ago, it fails to take into consideration more recent far-reaching changes which were induced by the extensive computerisation andthe effect that modern learner’s dictionaries had on the marketin general. It is a shame that the publisher presents it as if it were a new book rather than a reprint of a (back in 2000) six-year-old original.

2. LANDAUThis book is a second edition of an earlier work as well, but in contrast to BÉJOINT, it has been very thoroughly updated throughout, and therefore the fact that it is not a completely new book is not at all noticeable. It is the most voluminous ofthe textbooks reviewed here, its main text being more than 400 pages long. Somewhat surprisingly, it is also arguably the mostentertaining one, i.e. its extensiveness is not due to bad writing style but rather to the huge amount of information in the text.It contains eight chapters, most of which are rather long themselves, around 50 pages.The first one introduces the reader to a large variety of dictionaries. It proceeds as a simple taxonomy, grouping dictionaries by categories like number of languages, size, period of time covered and form of presentation, instead of trying to develop a more principled and rigid typology. Reasonably the reference works mentioned as examples are all English dictionaries which should be accessible to the reader.The second chapter is a very informative „brief history of English lexicography”, which retraces the evolution of English dictionaries from early bilingual and hard-words-dictionaries through Johnson’s and Webster’s work, the OED and other

unabridged dictionaries, up to the late 20th century with the characteristic learner’s dictionaries and offline and online electronic lexical resources. It pays attention both to the internal mechanisms of the profession, indicating the relationsof different dictionaries to each other, and external aspects like the effects of historical changes or the relation between the editors and society.Chapter 3, „Key elements of dictionaries and other language references”, discusses general formal (micro- and macrostructural) properties of reference works, like selection and ordering of the entries, the counting of entries (and its effect on the commercial advertising of the end products), grammatical, phonetic and etymological information, the treatment of synonyms, illustrations, and front and back matter. Instead of proposing some ideal rule system for the presentation of these information types, Landau demonstrates how they are actually handled on numerous characteristic examples.Chapter 4, „Definition”, is a very detailed and informative study of the practice of defining in monolingual dictionaries. It explains what principles such definitions aim to follow (e.g. avoiding circularity, being simple and brief), how words belonging to different parts of speech can be defined, and how corpus data are employed as sources in the process of defining.This chapter also includes some very interesting observations concerning the definition of technical terms (which relates to the author’s own work on medical dictionaries). Innovative defining styles, like those first systematically employed in the Collins COBUILD dictionary and since then also adapted by numerous other reference works, are scrutinized as well. In addition, the importance of illustrative quotations as parts ofdictionary entries is emphasised.The fifth chapter, „Usage”, examines the treatment of differentvarieties of language in dictionaries: regional variation, terminologies, taboo and insulting words; and the normative function of dictionaries as guides towards correct usage. Landau explains why this function is especially important for American dictionaries by identifying the social causes of the linguistic insecurity of certain parts of the populations of the United States.Chapter 6 discusses the role of electronic corpora in today’s lexicography. It sketches the history of corpus linguistics,

shows how the use of large-scale corpora changed the way dictionaries are created since the 1980s, and summarises the current situation. Then it explains how corpora are in fact employed by lexicographers. The author cites some interesting and convincing examples of how the examination of computer-generated concordances can support or correct the decisions of the dictionary compiler, e.g. when the existence of certain rare or dialectal uses of words is to be established. Finally he deals with the compilation of computer corpora, in particular with problems like having to persuade publishers to provide access to their electronic texts, the question of how the representativeness of a corpus can be assured, and what computational tools are required (e.g. concordance and part-of-speech tagging software).Chapter 7 acquaints the reader with technical details of the process of dictionary making: e.g. the scheduling of the dictionary project, estimating expenses, selecting the appropriate staff, and providing them with a style manual to coordinate the work. It is explained why the structure of the editing software is especially important, and how proofreading,printing or abridging a dictionary works.The final chapter, „Legal and ethical issues in lexicography”, contains a rather diverse selection of topics which are quite unrelated to each other. These include the problem of plagiarism in dictionaries (the wide-spread practice that earlier dictionaries are extensively copied by compilers of a new one), legal controversies over the treatment of trademarkedexpressions (product names) that have become common nouns (likekleenex and band-aid) in general dictionaries, and guidelines how lexicographers who have contributed to a dictionary (especially to an earlier edition) should be credited.The style of the book is excellent throughout, it is very interesting (due in part to the skilful selection of examples),entertaining and occasionally even humorous, which is not what one would probably expect to find in a textbook on lexicography. It is also obvious that the author is extremely well acquainted with the subject and mostly knows from personalexperience what he is writing about.The selection of topics makes this book especially useful for practical lexicographers who would like to gather ideas and expert advice for their work. Parts of it could be directly adapted as teaching material for a university course in

lexicography, although some of the chapters are somewhat too eclectic to serve this purpose without extensive modifications.The literature references are also mostly interesting. The inside information that Landau shares with the readers in chapter 7 is particularly exciting.On the other hand, readers who would like to gather material for a course dealing especially with dictionary use will not find much of direct interest in the book, since the relevant issues are mostly ignored by Landau.

3. HARTMANNThis volume is clearly the shortest of these textbooks. Its main text is just 146 pages long (8 of which are either blank or contain nothing more than a section title). This is followedby a list of relevant web sites, which takes up about 20 pages,a short glossary, and 20 pages of bibliography. Unfortunately, it is also not very satisfying content-wise. All of the numerous sections, which treat a wide selection of topics, are rather sketchy and one misses the depth of the discussions thatis characteristic of both BÉJOINT and LANDAU.Chapter 1, „The lexicographic scene”, defines lexicography as atwo-sided field: it includes a practical branch (dictionary making) and a theoretical one (dictionary research). The authorbriefly sketches the aims of the latter and mentions its current state as an academic discipline.Chapter 2 is about the process of creating dictionaries. First it cites several dictionary definitions of the word dictionary andthen names the main stages of a dictionary project. These are then elaborated briefly. The style of the elaboration deserves mention, since it is rather peculiar and remains the same throughout the book. Hartmann proceeds through the section by naming several more or less well-known lexicographic publications. Each such publication receives a short paragraph of its own, where Hartmann summarizes very succinctly what its author has got to say about the topic at hand. As a result, youget the impression that you are reading an annotated bibliography rather than a textbook. This style might appeal tosome readers, but I find it rather awkward and would prefer a coherent, continuous and detailed exposition of the views of a single author instead of short sketches of the positions of several.

At the end of this chapter Hartmann reports on one dictionary project he has worked on himself, the Dictionary of Lexicography. Unfortunately, this report is too short and superficial (just two pages) to really be of use.Chapter 3 describes the goals of dictionary research. In this chapter, another very typical feature of this book becomes apparent, namely, the distinct fondness of the author for numbered and bulleted lists, the individual points of which arenot further explained. These take up a significant part of thischapter and of the whole book in general. To cite an example from page 30: „Dictionary research is charged [...] to answer all the various (e.g. theoretical, methodological, terminological, historical and pedagogical) questions that may arise in:

the design and compilation of new dictionaries; the care and maintenance of older dictionaries; the critical evaluation of dictionaries; the assessment of the dictionary user’s needs and skills; the use of computers in dictionary making and dictionary

research; the elaboration of a history of dictionary making and

dictionary research; the determination of the cultural-historical importance of

dictionaries; the specification of dictionary formats and structures”

and the list goes on with an additional five entries. These might possibly be interesting for someone who wants to describesystematically what dictionary research is about, but a reader who is not already familiar with the field will find very little use for such lists and learn even less from them.This chapter concludes the first, introductory section of the book. The second section is about dictionary research and comprises the next three chapters.Chapter 4, „Historical and critical perspectives”, treats different ways to approach the history of dictionaries and dictionary criticism. The former include language history (how dictionaries document the change of language), cultural history(how the dictionaries are related to the cultural context in which they were created), genre-specific history (how the different kinds of dictionaries have evolved) and genealogical history (how different dictionaries are related to each other, viz. which copied which). These are introduced very briefly on

about one page each, in the usual style of the book, with many references to the literature and even more lists (of possible research topics, individual dictionaries etc.). The second large part of this chapter on perspectives on dictionary criticism discusses critical reviews of dictionaries, product tests, buying guides, critical monographs etc.Chapter 5, „Structural and typological perspectives”, introduces the most important concepts in connection with dictionary structure (like micro- and macrostructure and accessstructure), different ways to classify dictionaries, and some important dictionary types.Chapter 6 discusses the role of the user in lexicography, mentioning different reference needs, the skills required for successfully using dictionaries, and ways users can be trained in dictionary use. It is concluded by an enumeration of desiderata of dictionary use research.The third section of the book is entitled „Issues, methods and case studies” and consists of chapters 7 to 9.Chapter 7 begins with a summary of the earlier chapters and continues with an inordinately long list of (mostly very general) issues for further dictionary research, e.g. „What do we know about reference professionals and their working methods?”, „Do we have directories of lexicographers?”, „Do we have accounts of their qualifications, their training (e.g. courses), their career structure and job descriptions?”, „How have different lexicographic traditions emerged, and how do they change over time and space?”, „What theoretical framework is needed for metacriticism in lexicography?”, „What is the public image of dictionaries and other reference works?”. Unfortunately, these questions are just stated as such and not explained at all, so it is not clear what the point of answering them would be in many cases. For example, I fail to see any reasonable use that a directory of all the active lexicographers in the world (as demanded by Hartmann) could possibly be put to.Chapter 8 is concerned with the methods that can be employed indictionary research, e.g. the writing of critical reviews, questionnaires, interviews and protocols about dictionary use (which are the main tools for inquiring into the way users interact with reference works and which are an essential prerequisite for improving them). It also mentions some interdisciplinary relations of lexicography.

Finally, chapter 9 contains ten case studies of dictionary research. Each case study is essentially an abstract of a lexicographic publication. Each of these is concerned with quite different topics, e.g. developing dictionaries for the indigenous languages of South Africa, criticism of an English learner’s dictionary, or promoting the teaching of dictionary reference skills in China. Each such abstract is followed by some suggestions for follow-up studies, which are very similar to the lists of issues in chapter 7, although somewhat more specific, e.g. „What are the regulations in your country about dictionary use in secondary and higher education? Are dictionaries permitted or encouraged in, or banned from, examinations in your institution? What reasons are given for this?”The last 50 pages are taken up by a long list of information sources (mostly web sites) that could be used by researchers and students of lexicography, e.g. sites of journals, dictionary publishers, and research institutions; a glossary; abibliography; and an index.Overall, the book feels like a draft or a sketch of an introduction to lexicography rather than a finished work itself. The ways in which this textbook can be used are therefore quite limited. Since most of the text is very much like an annotated bibliography it can reasonably be used as a guide to the literature of the field. One notable point in connection with this aspect of the book is that it takes the German and French literature of the field seriously and refers to it regularly, which is unfortunately not the case in LANDAU, for example. The suggestions for further research, especially in chapters 7 and 9, can be used conveniently by teachers of lexicography courses as a source of assignments for the students.Unfortunately apart from its contents the style of the book is somewhat curious as well. That the author is in love with numbers becomes apparent already in the preface where the contents of the book are characterized quantitatively instead of in terms of the aims or the contents of the chapters: „Chapter 4 documents seven historical and six critical perspectives, Chapter 5 specifies six structural perspectives and some aspects of dictionary typology in greater detail, and Chapter 6 has more to say about six user perspectives. In Section III, I look at eight sets of issues that have emerged

for more detailed treatment in dictionary research (Chapter 7),explore various methods tried, including the notion of interdisciplinary collaboration (Chapter 8), and single out tencase studies (Chapter 9) in order to encourage readers to carryout their own projects.” (page xi). Or to cite another typical sentence from the text: „the MA dissertation of Nakamoto (1994)attempted to establish criteria in the form of 27 macrostructural and 26 microstructural ’check-points” or rules for the evaluation of (English) learners’ dictionaries as well as 21 check-points about the focus of the review and a further 13 about the status of the reviewer” (page 55). Hartmann even goes as far as counting the contributors and the papers in edited volumes and adding this information to the entries in the bibliography, e.g. the Zürilex ’86 proceedings edited by Snell-Hornby contain „45 papers by 51 authors” (page 202). Although this might not sound particularly disturbing, most readers will probably be extremely irritated by it in the long run.

4. ENGELBERG/LEMNITZERThis work of two young German linguists is the only non-Englishtextbook reviewed here. In a way, it is the most straightforward practical introduction to lexicography that is available today. The authors do not treat topics which are of little utility to someone interested in either the use or the compilation of dictionaries (most notably the history of dictionaries), and concentrate on those which are directly important to students of languages.The first chapter examines the concept of dictionary, the typology of dictionaries, the differentiation of dictionaries and encyclopaedias and mentions the problem of separating lexical and world knowledge. As in every chapter, the text is illustrated by a relatively very large number of relevant quotations from dictionaries and by figures. There are also exercises and suggestions for further reading which are not just listed but also briefly characterised.A peculiar characteristic of this textbook are the short digressions from the main topic of the chapter, which treat mostly some theoretical problem like lexical semantic theories or some less central and sometimes odd issues like the mechanisms of tolerant search in electronic dictionaries. Thesedigressions, exercises and literature references are printed in

frames with a light grey background, in smaller type than the main text.The second chapter is an overview of many more or less important kinds of dictionaries. The main emphasis is on surveying the market and acquainting the students with dictionaries which are available for different purposes, ratherthan on developing a systematic typology. Interestingly the authors not only treat print dictionaries and the more usual electronic ones but also internet dictionaries, e.g. of gay slang, comics or dialect words, which are created in part interactively, i.e. the visitors of the site can contribute their own material to them. These are completely ignored by theother textbooks, although they constitute a trend which will possibly become very influential in the near future.The third chapter discusses dictionary use from different perspectives. It briefly reviews the main goals, methods and results of the relevant research and then examines the process of looking up information in print and electronic dictionaries.Most of the chapter is devoted to a more thorough analysis of different ways dictionaries are consulted: to solve comprehension and production problems in one’s native language,a foreign language, and for translation.The fourth chapter covers the general structure of dictionaries. This is done according to the theoretical framework developed by Wiegand and elaborated most thoroughly in the international encyclopaedia of lexicography. The three basic levels of structural analysis are the macrostructure, themicrostructure and the access structure. As opposed to HARTMANN’s appropriate chapter (which is based on the same framework) these levels are not just abstractly explained but also illustrated by many examples.Chapter 5 explains how the quality of dictionaries can be assessed. The authors propose several principles for dictionarycriticism and describe these in detail. Some of these principles are general rules, e.g. of fairness, others are actual criteria that can be employed when analysing a dictionary, e.g. how multiword lexical items are treated, or ifthe front matter explains adequately to the reader how the dictionary is to be used and how the entries are built up. It is worth mentioning that such criteria are suggested not only for print dictionaries, but for electronic ones as well.

The last chapter reviews the process of the creation of dictionaries. As opposed to the treatment of this topic e.g. inLANDAU, it is presented in a rather general way. All the important stages of a dictionary project are covered (from market research and the selection of the editors to the publication of the completed work in printed or electronic form) without going into the details of any of these. The goal of the authors is just to familiarize the students with the rudiments of the process, not to train dictionary compilers.The main text of the book ends on page 228. The last 50 pages contain a short glossary, an index, and a rather long bibliography of dictionaries and scholarly publications referred to in the text.Overall ENGELBERG/LEMNITZER is an excellent textbook which can be used effectively in a course on lexicography which is a part ofa modern languages curriculum at a university. Features which are especially useful in this respect are the numerous citations from print dictionaries and screenshots of electronicones, and the exercises (which are unfortunately of varying quality).The style of the text is somewhat uneven, ranging from facetious to rather demanding. In contrast to JACKSON, which hassimilar goals, this book is not meant for readers with no background in linguistics at all. In fact, in some sections even students of a modern philology who are not especially familiar with linguistics will have problems understanding whatthe authors are talking about. Since even some knowledge of theterminology of lexicography is required at certain points, students who wish to study the book on their own rather than under the supervision of a teacher will probably have to use the glossary at the end of the book regularly.

5. JACKSONThis is the shortest of the textbooks covered here. As opposed to BÉJOINT and LANDAU it is clearly conceived as a book for students in lexicography courses. This is quite apparent when one looks at its structure. It contains 14 short chapters whichcan be comfortably read during a university semester.The book begins with a short introduction to English lexicology(20 pages), which is contained in the first two chapters. This part introduces standard topics like different notions of word,multiword lexical items, parts of speech, morphological and

semantic analysis of words. It is intended for students who have very little or no background in linguistics and take part in a lexicography course.The introduction to lexicography itself starts in the third chapter, where it is explained to the readers what dictionariesare, that they are structured on the levels of micro- and macrostructure, and that they differ from each other in terms of contents. The creation and criticism of dictionaries is alsobriefly discussed.Chapters 4 through 6 are concerned with the history of English dictionaries, in a way similar to the appropriate chapter in LANDAU, the most obvious difference being that American dictionaries receive somewhat less attention here. The history of the OED is treated most thoroughly; the whole fifth chapter is devoted to its development from its origins up to its planned third edition. Chapter 6 includes an overview of the most important dictionaries of different types available today.The topic of chapter 7 is the interaction of users and dictionaries. It discusses the possible aims of dictionaries and what the users actually do with them, and the possibilitiesand methods of researching such issues.Chapters 8 through 10 examine different parts of the microstructures of general-purpose monolingual dictionaries. Chapter 8 takes a look at dictionary definitions, i.e. how wordmeanings are explained. It mentions different techniques of treating lexical ambiguity and also examines how sense relations (like synonymy) are handled. Chapter 9 covers the other information types in the entries of general-purpose dictionaries, e.g. pronunciation, inflection and types of usagerestrictions. Etymological information is discussed separately in chapter 10. It is explained how to make sense of such information and why it is included at all in synchronic dictionaries.Chapter 11 contains a very informative comparison of the four major learners’ dictionaries (OALD, LDOCE, COBUILD and CIDE). It highlights the innovative characteristics of modern learners’ dictionaries in general and of each of these four dictionaries in particular.Chapter 12 discusses thematically-arranged dictionaries (i.e. thesauruses), their history, structure and possible uses. It emphasises the tradition of thesauruses and treats e.g. Roget’s

classic work besides examining the current situation of print and electronic thesauruses.Chapter 13 describes the process of compiling dictionaries, concentrating especially on the use of electronic corpora.Finally, the topic of Chapter 14 is dictionary criticism. It isconsidered which criteria are appropriate for judging the quality of dictionaries.Each chapter is concluded by a few suggestions for further reading. These were selected very reasonably, i.e. only the arguably most important and most recent works on the respectivetopics are referred to, so those readers who are interested in some issue are provided with a good place to start researching it, but are not overwhelmed by a huge number of suggestions.As its size already indicates, this book was written with students in mind who are not familiar with lexicography at all.This conception is carried through very systematically. An important feature of this book is the author’s intensive use ofillustrative quotations, which makes the discussion of the introduced concepts very accessible.Other readers who are already well acquainted with lexicographywill profit little from reading this book, since all the topicstreated are quite basic.One subject that in my opinion should have received somewhat more attention in this book is the popular misconceptions concerning dictionaries which are widespread among the public and probably also shared by some of the typical readers of thisintroduction. These are mentioned in some places ironically butnot refuted, which may lead to misunderstandings.

6. STERKENBURGThis sizeable volume, which was edited by the Dutch lexicographer Piet van Sterkenburg, is a collection of very short sections (about 10 pages each) which were written by different authors (mostly, but not necessarily experts of the respective topics). Although its title, „A practical guide to lexicography”, suggests that this is a book from which lexicographers can learn how to create a dictionary, it is definitely not a systematic and coherent introduction to the field in general and to the tools of the trade in particular. Since it lacks both a general conception and a clear line of thought that would hold together the material, it is rather a

reference work, somewhat similar to the encyclopaedia of lexicography.What is especially eye-catching in the table of contents is, onthe one hand, the unusually large number of very famous linguists who have contributed to this collection, e.g. Geeraerts, Booij, Verkuyl, Ferenc Kiefer and John Sinclair, and, on the other hand, the predominance of less well-known Dutch authors. Summarizing all the 29 sections would be quite pointless, so I will only outline the seven chapters by which the volume is organized.Chapter 1, entitled „Foundations”, introduces a wide variety oftopics, namely, how dictionary can be defined, the general historyof dictionaries, their sources, research of dictionary use, types of articles (e.g. nested lemmas) and dictionary typology.Since all these diverse topics are treated on a mere 70 pages it should not come as a surprise that their treatment is rathershallow. The problem is even more obvious if one looks at how much space was devoted to individual issues. E.g. the history of dictionaries takes up 9 pages and the experimental research of dictionary use gets two and a half. (It should be noted thatthe size of these pages is not particularly large, unlike e.g. the international encyclopaedia of lexicography. They are roughly the same size as those of ENGELBERG/LEMNITZER and LANDAU, and somewhat less dense than those of JACKSON.)Many of the authors (not just in this first chapter, but throughout the book) were obviously puzzled how such complex topics can be described under the given limitations and chose to elaborate one or two interesting details and ignore everything else instead of attempting to race through many issues very superficially. A very typical example is the section on source material for dictionaries (1.2), which devotes 4 pages to „corpora as lexical resources”. Elementary concepts like concordances are not even mentioned here, tagginggets about half a page, and most of the four pages examine whatkinds of texts two electronic corpora (the British and the Czech national corpus) are composed of.Chapter 2 („Descriptive lexicography”) examines mostly different parts of microstructure, namely, the treatment of phonetic, morphological, syntactic, pragmatic and semantic information. Additionally, two special types of dictionary are treated in this chapter in two separate sections: dictionaries of proverbs and onomasiological dictionaries (synonym

dictionaries and thesauruses). It is unclear why these two latter sections were included here and not in the following chapter.The section (2.2) entitled „Meaning and definition” by Dirk Geeraerts is an interesting representative of those sections which do not concentrate on few specific topics (like the one mentioned above) but try to cover (within 10 pages) the whole range of topics that can be associated with their title. Geeraerts introduces the concepts of semasiology and onomasiology (1 page), polysemy (1 page), different types of meaning (denotational, emotive, grammatical, pragmatic – 2 pages), intensional vs. extensional (prototypical) definitions (2 pages), and definitional formats (1 page). It should be obvious that such a short overview cannot possibly serve as a „practical guide” for beginning lexicographers who would like to learn how word meanings should be specified in a dictionary.For the sake of comparison, LANDAU treats just the definitional formats on more than ten dense pages. To make matters worse there is not even a single reference to the relevant literaturein this section, which would at least enable the novice to gather the needed information elsewhere.Chapter 3, „Special types of dictionaries”, consists of two sections: one on bilingual and one on specialized dictionaries.Both are much too short to be informative.According to its title, chapter 4 is supposed to discuss the role corpora play in lexicography. The first section on the notion and the collection of corpora and the second section on the annotation of corpora do exactly this and are among the best contributions to this volume (both were written by John Sinclair). The third section (by Truus Kruyt) seems to revolve around machine-readable dictionaries (like the classic LDOCE) and stresses that these have to be reusable in order to be employed effectively for different tasks like natural language processing applications. This section does not seem to have anything to do with corpora, but rather with lexical databases.However, this discussion is so extremely unspecific that I was not able to understand the point of this section (and I am not sure if it has one at all). Oddly the fourth section is not about corpora at all either, but is rather a description of thesoftware used by the staff of the dictionary of Afrikaans for editing the dictionary entries.

Chapter 5, which covers the issue of designing (paper or electronic) dictionaries, contains three sections. The first explains how an electronic dictionary is designed. The second considers what possibilities are opened by today’s technology to make looking up information more user-friendly. The third describes very superficially some important characteristics of electronic dictionaries, e.g. searchability, the use of multimedia, and that there is no need for abbreviations anymore.Chapter 6, „Realisation of dictionaries”, treats basically the same kind of topics as chapter 2, i.e. information classes in microstructure. It contains a section on phonological, morphological and syntactic information in dictionaries (6.1 byBooij), which is somewhat surprising, as a short section on exactly the same topic already appeared in chapter 2. The emphasis is different in these two sections (which is not surprising, since they were written by different authors): Section 2.1 (by de Caluwe and van Santen) is more practical, citing several examples from dictionaries, whereas 6.1 concentrates on theoretical notions like allomorphy and productivity. However, their coverage is basically the same (apart from the fact that in 6.1 just a special kind of syntactic information is discussed, namely, idiomatic patterns.Another topic that was already treated in chapter 2 and reappears here is semantic information. Section 6.3 by Fons Moerdijk concentrates on the issue of lexical ambiguity in dictionaries. It introduces such notions as polysemy and homonymy and illustrates these by a relatively detailed case study. The author cites several real-world occurrences of the word school and then examines how this word is treated in four current English dictionaries.Further sections in this chapter cover occurrence examples, usage labels (which were partly already treated in section 2.4 on „Pragmatic specifications”) and etymological information.Finally, chapter 7 describes the design and production procedures of different kinds of dictionaries. This chapter is as heterogeneous as all the others. The first two sections (on bilingual and terminological dictionaries) really concentrate on stages of design and production (like specifying a general architecture, constructing a corpus and making a business plan). The third one on bilingual dictionaries by Kiefer and van Sterkenburg devotes disproportionately much attention to

the description of the microstructure of general monolingual dictionaries (which is a waste of space, since these questions have already been dealt with in chapters 2 and 6) and indicatesonly roughly what the actual planning stages consist in (e.g. style manual and organisation of staff). And the last section on collocation dictionaries does not mention the design and production processes at all, but rather compares several dictionaries of this type.As one can probably deduce from the above summary of the contents, I am not at all pleased with this book. The reason why it fails to be a reasonable choice for a textbook of lexicography is that its general conception is seriously mistaken. The text is extremely incoherent and the individual sections are arranged unsystematically, therefore the reader has the impression of reading a collection of papers or a conference proceedings. One expects a textbook to confer an understanding of a subject to its readers. STERKENBURG fails to deliver this, because one only gets to see small fragments of the picture which do not combine to a complete whole.The one to blame for this is not the authors, but the editor, who worked in an outrageously sloppy way on this volume. This is apparent on every level of the editing process. The illogical arrangement and the unmotivated repetitions of the chapters have already been mentioned. But it is also the editorwho should have noticed that having the contributors write short essays on different topics which can be read each by themselves is not the right way to handle the material. Each section contains an introduction, the exposition of the concepts considered most important to the topic by the author, and a conclusion. Unfortunately, this takes away too much spacefrom the exposition of the topics of the sections. Also it becomes very irritating to read yet another definition of dictionary or microstructure for the fifth time in the same book.The editor should have followed the example of the encyclopaedia of lexicography in heavily cross-referencing the sections. This would have created at least some sense of congruity and made finding some needed information easier. For example, it was mentioned that the section on source materials for dictionaries contains a short and relatively useless section on corpora as lexicographic resources. It would have been very reasonable to indicate at that point that the use of corpora for such purposes is discussed in several other

chapters as well, especially 4.1, 4.2 and 6.2. Of course, this problem is not specific to this single topic, but applies to the whole book. Generally it seems that the authors were not aware of what the other contributors were writing about in their sections.The references to literature have not been standardised consistently by the editor either. Although most of the contributors refer to publications in the standard way (by author and year of appearance) and there is a combined bibliography for all the section at the end of the book (which is a sensible and standard solution), there are sections that do contain a bibliography themselves. Notably at the end of section 2.4 one finds a long list of dictionaries referred to in this section, and it seems that the editor forgot to remove the references from the end of 5.2.There are many other inconsistencies in the handling of the references as well. To mention just three cases I have noticed without checking systematically:Firstly, the 1997 paper of Atkins and Varantola appears twice in the bibliography, once under „Atkins, B. T. S.” and once under „Atkins, S.”.Secondly, one finds a reference to „Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (Norris & Norris 1971)” on page 65 (section 1.5 by Swanepoel); and a few lines later another reference to „Morris and Morris (1975)”. Although it does not become clear from the text that these are supposed to refer to the same publication, this seems to be the case, since neither of these two references are to be found in the bibliography, but rather a third one: „Norris, W. & Norris, M. (1975). Harper Dictionaryof Contemporary Usage”.And thirdly, it is hardly understandable that a textbook published in 2003 contains several references to the 1984 edition of LANDAU, but not a single one to the current edition.Whereas the editor has the sole responsibility for the deficiencies mentioned up to this point, there is a further point that at least the publisher ought to have checked, namely, the quality of the language of the contributions. Several chapters, especially those written by the Dutch contributors, contain some unidiomatic English, and there are lots of typos that were not corrected either.Overall, STERKENBURG is a remarkably unprofessional textbook. It is a shame that a half-finished work like this could be

published by a reputable publisher. Since not only the quality of this book is below par but it is also disproportionately expensive to boot, one should not reward John Benjamins by buying it.

7. Comparison of the contents of the textbooks discussedAfter having summarised each of the six books individually, I will give a brief overview of how certain topics that should beof interest to several prospective readers are covered in them.

a) Overview of general monolingual dictionaries currently available:The definitely most usable introduction and comparison of general monolingual English dictionaries is to be found in JACKSON. Both ENGELBERG/LEMNITZER and HARTMANN list current major monolingual dictionaries (including the English one) but do notexamine how they differ. LANDAU only mentions the major English dictionaries and concentrates on the American ones, but he compares them only on a fairly abstract level, which does not help much to get acquainted with their most important characteristics. BÉJOINT is too outdated to be of any use in this respect. There is no comparable section in STERKENBURG.

b) Bilingual dictionariesThe characteristics of bilingual dictionaries are treated quiteconsistently in ENGELBERG/LEMNITZER throughout the book, although they do not receive much attention. STERKENBURG also contains a relevant section (3.1). The others have very little or nothing at all to say on this topic.

c) Other kinds of dictionariesENGELBERG/LEMNITZER systematically surveys the different types of non-general dictionaries and illustrates this with numerous examples. LANDAU does something similar in chapter 1, although that overview is less systematic and lacks examples, which means that readers unfamiliar with representatives of the different types of special dictionaries will have problems following this part.

d) History of dictionariesNone of these textbooks contains a serious general history of dictionaries. However, the history of English lexicography is

examined quite thoroughly in LANDAU and in less detail, but still informatively in both JACKSON and BÉJOINT.

e) Structural characteristicsHARTMANN contains only a very general and abstract overview of the structure of dictionaries. ENGELBERG/LEMNITZER’s treatment of this topic is substantially similar, but significantly more detailed. As usual they illustrate this part with examples, which makes it especially accessible to beginners. JACKSON treats microstructure in chapters 8 to 10 (using many examples as well), but ignores macrostructure. LANDAU devotes almost 200 pages to a relatively short discussion of macrostructure and toelements of microstructure, especially the treatment of pragmatic and semantic information. One can gather much information on structural topics from STERKENBURG if one has the patience to look for them, since it is dispersed throughout thebook.

f) Dictionary useENGELBERG/LEMNITZER, HARTMANN and STERKENBURG contain useful (although somewhat sketchy) general overviews of dictionary useresearch. The relevant chapter of JACKSON is too short and does not contain much material of interest. The discussion in chapter 5 of BÉJOINT is better than any of these, but does not take the research of the past 10 years into account (which has produced many interesting results) and is therefore outdated. LANDAU does not discuss such issues.

g) The creation of dictionariesAlthough it also contains a rather long and informative separate chapter on dictionary making, most of the other chapters of LANDAU are presented from the point of view of the practical lexicographer as well. Therefore, this is the best source by far for someone who wants to learn about details of how a dictionary is compiled. ENGELBERG/LEMNITZER’s overview is still very informative but of manageable size, whereas JACKSON’sis too short and superficial. Some sections of STERKENBURG (especially 4.4, 7.1 and 7.2) are also interesting.

8. Possible uses of the textbooks discussedIn my opinion only two of these books can be used as a course material for an introduction to lexicography at a university,

namely, ENGELBERG/LEMNITZER and JACKSON. They are both reasonably priced, treat a wide variety of topics, and are accessible to readers who do not have any background in lexicography. JACKSON could be best used in an easier course for beginners who are not particularly interested in these topics, whereas ENGELBERG/LEMNITZER is most appropriate for an intermediate-level course for language teachers in training (with a good background in linguistics) who should be familiar with different types of dictionaries to be able to work successfullyin their jobs. Unfortunately there is no comparable intermediate-level introduction in English.LANDAU is much too detailed to be used efficiently as a course material, but should be the most interesting of the books discussed for teachers and researchers of lexicography and especially for practical lexicographers, since it contains a wealth of background information on all possible aspects of dictionaries, particularly their creation.Although BÉJOINT is outdated and STERKENBURG unsuited because of the reasons mentioned above to be used as teaching material, some of their chapters would make good reading assignments for students. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of BÉJOINT could be especially well suited. On the other hand, most of STERKENBURG will be of little interest to either researchers or dictionary writers as well, since the majority of the sections are very general or superficial. BÉJOINT is somewhat better but still too basic and too old to be interesting for these readers, who probably know the 1994 printing anyway.Although HARTMANN is unusable for beginners because of its very schematic character, it could be well used by advanced students, e.g. those who would like to write an MA thesis in lexicography, since it reviews the literature on certain topicsfairly well. Although JACKSON approvingly states that HARTMANN sets the agenda for future research in lexicography, and shouldtherefore be especially interesting for metalexicographers, I found its presentation of the goals of research less than convincing.

9. ConclusionsIt can be concluded that all groups of readers should find something of interest in the current offering of lexicography textbooks. Both JACKSON and ENGELBERG/LEMNITZER are good introductions. LANDAU is an excellent and entertaining

exposition of the field that should be read by all those who are more deeply interested in dictionaries and those who make aliving as practical or theoretical lexicographers. HARTMANN is ausable and informed resource for advanced students and researchers, although it has its flaws.Besides these books which can be recommended to the interested readers, the other two deserve to be ignored by them. BÉJOINT seems to have been republished by Oxford University Press only because there is a need for introductions to lexicography and because several other publishers also have one. It is a well-written textbook with a single serious but fatal flaw: that it was written more than ten years ago and misses the recent changes of the field. All of those who could be advised to readBÉJOINT are better served today by either JACKSON and ENGELBERG/LEMNITZER or LANDAU. Finally, STERKENBURG suffers from a flawed editorial conception and sloppy publishing.There remains one desideratum in the market of lexicography textbooks: an introduction in English which provides a deeper picture than JACKSON but is more pedagogically conceived than LANDAU.