Trends in Twenty-five Years of Academic Lexicography

TRENDS IN TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OFACADEMIC LEXICOGRAPHY

Gilles-Maurice de Schryver: KongoKing Research Group, Department of Languages andCultures,Ghent University; Xhosa Department, University of theWestern Cape([email protected])

Abstract

Two dedicated lexicographic corpora are presented. The first contains all the material

published in IJL to date—the English component 3.5 million words strong, with a

time-depth of twenty-five years. The second contains the English contents from all

the major lexicographic journals, manuals, encyclopaedias, conference proceedings

and some books—16.5 million words in all, with a time-depth of fifty years.

Keywords and keyness values are calculated through a comparison with the

100-million-word BNC, and trends in both the IJL corpus and the lexicographic refer-

ence corpus are drawn up and compared with one another. This procedure provides for

an unbiased view of the major scholars and topics in academic lexicography over the

past twenty-five years, down to fifty years for some aspects, with an indication of their

impact through time.

1. Lexicographic journals and their silver jubilees

Journals tend to celebrate their 25th anniversary; so it is in our discipline. When

Dictionaries—the journal of the Dictionary Society of North America

(DSNA)—turned 25, memoirs by several founding members of the DSNA

were inserted between the article section and the review section of the

twenty-fifth volume (Gates et al. 2004). When Lexicographica—the interna-

tional annual for lexicography—turned 25, a celebratory foreword was

included on the occasion of the jubilee (Wiegand 2009). When Paul

Bogaards invited me to coordinate the celebration of the 25th anniversary of

the International Journal of Lexicography (IJL)—the journal of the European

Association for Lexicography (EURALEX)—I suggested using an entire spe-

cial issue for that. I opted for three distinct parts. In the first I wished to hear

from each of the three editors to date (R. Ilson, T. Cowie and P. Bogaards)

how they looked back on their period at the helm of IJL. I also asked them to

International Journal of Lexicography, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 464–506doi:10.1093/ijl/ecs030 464

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single out a number of defining moments. For the second part I had selected

three key topics—corpora, semantic networks and metalexicography—and

invited three colleagues (P. Hanks, T. Fontenelle and R. Gouws) to not only

reflect on but also map the future directions in those fields for our discipline. In

the third and final section I wanted to ‘interact’ with each of these invited

contributions, using two lexicographic corpora: on the one hand the full text

of twenty-five years of IJL, on the other a much larger lexicographic reference

corpus with a time-depth of fifty years.

The discussion which follows is thus driven by corpus data, a conscious

choice. All the lexicographic trends shown are those as reflected in the

academic literature of our discipline. Of particular interest to us will be to

see if the trends in IJL concur with the trends in the wider lexicographic

literature. Where did IJL lead? Where did IJL merely follow a trend? Where

did IJL take a different direction altogether? Are there uberhaupt patterns to

discern?

The entire undertaking stands or falls on the quality of the two lexicographic

corpora, so we will first describe their composition in some detail (Sections 2

and 3). We then proceed with a comparison of these two special-field cor-

pora—with one another, but also with a general-language corpus (Section 4).

Then follows the presentation of the interaction with the six invited contribu-

tions (Sections 5.1 through 5.6). In a final section we then look back at the

entire enterprise (Section 6).

2. The IJL corpus (i.e. the International Journal of Lexicography corpus)

Basically, ‘the IJL corpus’ contains everything that has appeared between the

covers of this journal over the past twenty-five years, including the contribu-

tions to this jubilee issue, except for the present article. Also left out are the

sections ‘Publications Received’, the ‘EURALEX Bulletin / Newsletter’ and the

‘List of EURALEX Members’. The basic statistics of this corpus are shown in

Table 1, with the IJL classification (indented) as well as our summary (in cap-

itals) per category: 818 items in all, of which 340 articles, 21 review articles, 417

book reviews and 40 editorials. The total size of this corpus is 4,008,713 tokens.

In order to be able to compare like with like, however, only the English section

will be worked with in this study. Taking out the contributions in French,

Spanish, German and Italian, leaves us with 716 items: 307 articles, 21

review articles, 350 book reviews and 38 editorials. The size of this English

section is 3,545,609 tokens. In short, then, the IJL corpus that will be referred

to throughout this article is this 3.5-million-word corpus of academic material

that appeared in IJL over the past twenty-five years. There are nearly 130

thousand types in this corpus.

Trends in Twenty-five Years of Academic Lexicography 465


3. The LEX corpus (i.e. the lexicographic reference corpus)

3.1 Journals sub-corpus

Given that we wish to compare the material in the IJL corpus with an even

larger body of lexicographic material, questions regarding the balance and

representativeness of such a reference corpus come to mind. Making choices

here is prone to debate and disagreement. Nonetheless, at least some compo-

nents are ‘natural candidates’, and their inclusion should not be controversial.

As was clear from the invited contributions by R. Ilson and R. Gouws, the

three other major journals of our discipline are Dictionaries, Lexicographica

and Lexikos—the journal of the African Association for Lexicography

(AFRILEX). The English material of these three journals therefore constitutes

Table 1: Basic statistics of the IJL corpus.

Type N_all % N_English %

ARTICLE 340 41.6 307 42.9

Article 318 38.9 287 40.1

Supplementary Material Online 3 0.4 3 0.4

Special Feature 9 1.1 9 1.3

Debate 4 0.5 3 0.4

Practical Lexicography 3 0.4 3 0.4

References 2 0.2 2 0.3

Erratum 1 0.1 0 0.0

REVIEW ARTICLE 21 2.6 21 2.9

Review Article 20 2.4 20 2.8

Glossary 1 0.1 1 0.1

BOOK REVIEW 417 51.0 350 48.9

Book Review 411 50.2 347 48.5

Conference Report 5 0.6 2 0.3

Note 1 0.1 1 0.1

EDITORIAL 40 4.9 38 5.3

Editorial 26 3.2 24 3.4

Discussion 10 1.2 10 1.4

Correspondence 3 0.4 3 0.4

Biographical Note 1 0.1 1 0.1

818 818 100.0 100.0 716 716 100.0 100.0

Not in corpus 175 175

Publications Received 60 60

EURALEX Bulletin / Newsletter 94 94

List of EURALEX Members 21 21

466 Gilles-Maurice de Schryver

http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/ecs030/DC1


the first sub-corpus of our lexicographic reference corpus, henceforth ‘the LEX

corpus’. The basic statistics are summarized in Table 2, where the information

about IJL is added for convenience. As may be seen from this table, IJL is the

largest of the four journals, both in terms of annual contributions and in terms

of number of tokens.

3.2 Manuals sub-corpus

A number of very influential lexicographic manuals have appeared since, start-

ing with Zgusta’s Manual of Lexicography (1971), and for two, fully revised,

updated and enlarged editions were also prepared. The manuals included in the

LEX corpus are shown in Table 3. In each case the full text has been kept.

3.3 Encyclopaedias sub-corpus

In an attempt to cover as many languages and language-pairs, types of diction-

aries and sub-disciplines of lexicography as possible, all sections in English

from the three-volume encyclopaedia Worterbucher / Dictionaries /

Dictionnaires (HSK5) were added, as well as all lexicographic sections from

Table 3: Basic statistics of the Manuals sub-corpus.

Manual Year Tokens Types STTR std. dev.

Zgusta 1971 162,865 11,106 38.57 60.50

Landau 1984 156,553 11,016 42.03 56.93

Svensen 1993 89,523 8,836 38.93 59.86

Landau 2001 194,634 12,718 41.41 57.48

Jackson 2002 79,151 8,600 40.96 57.54

Atkins & Rundell 2008 186,906 11,854 40.64 58.08

Svensen 2009 185,417 12,046 37.19 62.34

Table 2: Basic statistics of the Journals sub-corpus (IJL is not part of this

sub-corpus, and is only shown for comparison here).1

Journal Period N_all Tokens N_English Tokens Types STTR std.

dev.

Dictionaries 1979-2011 590 2,358,202 588 2,350,389 106,037 43.03 57.18

Lexicographica 1985-2011 803 3,544,010 188 1,233,411 66,845 40.35 59.13

IJL 1988-2012 818 4,008,713 716 3,545,609 129,970 40.92 58.10

Lexikos 1991-2012 670 3,268,583 464 2,343,161 84,215 39.63 59.64



the fourteen-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition

(ELL2). The details are shown in Table 4.

3.4 Proceedings sub-corpus

A lexicographic reference corpus must not fail to include the proceedings of

one of the first modern academic meetings that brought lexicographers to-

gether, now fifty years ago, namely Householder and Saporta’s Problems in

Lexicography (1962). All contributions in English from the EURALEX con-

ference proceedings have also been added to the Proceedings sub-corpus. There

are no proceedings for the DSNA and AFRILEX conferences; papers read

there are typically reworked for submission to, resepectively, Dictionaries or

Lexikos (cf. Section 3.1.). There are no proceedings for the meetings of the

Australasian Association for Lexicography (AUSTRALEX) either, but there

are for those of the Asian Association for Lexicography (ASIALEX). Over half

of the ASIALEX conference proceedings have been added.2 The full contents

from the new series of eLEX (i.e. electronic lexicography) conferences complete

this sub-corpus, together with most contributions from their precursor series,

namely the COMPLEX (i.e. computational lexicography) conferences.3

Table 5 lists the basic statistics.4 Note that the EURALEX papers are the

single biggest component of the LEX corpus.

Table 5: Basic statistics of the Proceedings sub-corpus.

Proceedings Period /

Year

N_English Tokens Types STTR std. dev.

Householder & Saporta (eds.) 1962 22 94,869 10,786 43.22 53.94

EURALEX 1984-2012 1,206 3,904,186 145,941 40.16 59.14

ASIALEX 1997-2011 313 597,061 31,725 38.36 60.54

COMPLEX 1992-2005 107 377,003 23,252 38.90 60.50

eLEX 2010-2011 91 325,445 20,309 40.14 59.22

Table 4: Basic statistics of the Encyclopaedias sub-corpus.

Encyclopaedia Period /

Year

N_English Tokens Types STTR std. dev.

Worterbucher / Dictionaries /

Dictionnaires

1989-1991 117 509,217 40,398 41.65 57.21

Encyclopedia of Language and

Linguistics, 2nd ed.

2006 79 213,021 20,330 42.32 57.49



3.5 Books sub-corpus

The largest lexicographic book series is Lexicographica Series Maior (LSM)

and a total of fifteen books were randomly selected from the 40 published in

English to date, as indicated in Table 6.5 Another fourteen books were selected

from a variety of lexicographic sub-disciplines, covering the history of lexicog-

raphy (Wells 1973), bilingual lexicography (Piotrowski 1994), Asian lexicog-

raphy (Benson 2001, Yong and Peng 2008), learners’ dictionaries (Humble

2001, Kernerman and Bogaards 2010), dictionary use (Welker 2010),

Table 6: Basic statistics of the Books sub-corpus.

Book Year Tokens Types STTR std. dev.

Wells 1973 58,372 6,707 42.27 55.97

Dolezal – LSM4 1985 31,653 4,985 41.04 56.18

Piotrowski 1994 60,168 5,829 38.11 60.38

Herbst & Popp (eds.) – LSM95 1999 119,737 11,811 39.66 59.40

Immken & Wolski (eds.; transl. of Wiegand) –

LSM97

1999 167,000 12,100 38.12 61.08

Nesi – LSM98 2000 77,240 6,569 37.85 60.78

Benson 2001 105,150 8,698 37.57 61.08

Humble 2001 66,301 6,961 39.19 57.82

Tono – LSM106 2001 95,415 7,504 35.55 62.76

Dolezal & Creamer (eds.; coll. of Zgusta) –

LSM129

2006 190,892 23,687 43.68 54.32

Dziemianko – LSM130 2006 98,651 6,792 33.06 63.60

Szczepaniak – LSM131 2006 66,496 7,603 38.00 56.76

Hartmann – LSM133 2007 108,551 10,357 45.02 53.77

Miyoshi – LSM132 2007 101,018 7,075 34.76 63.43

Cowie (ed.) 2008 388,774 25,740 42.65 56.78

Fuertes-Olivera & Arribas-Bano 2008 56,500 6,619 39.21 58.64

Tarp – LSM134 2008 142,298 10,594 37.67 61.88

Yong & Peng 2008 167,105 9,169 37.50 60.86

Boas (ed.) 2009 107,522 8,603 38.99 59.56

Adams (ed.) 2010 95,480 10,823 41.14 57.64

Fuertes-Olivera (ed.) – LSM136 2010 88,776 8,011 38.02 61.37

Kernerman & Bogaards (eds.) 2010 61,165 6,308 39.92 58.44

Welker 2010 160,488 8,205 37.15 62.10

Fuertes-Olivera & Bergenholtz (eds.) 2011 119,958 10,842 39.88 59.60

Herbst, Faulhaber & Uhrig (eds.) 2011 98,611 10,463 41.29 57.00

Stark – LSM140 2011 135,201 10,583 39.08 59.19

Granger & Paquot (eds.) 2012 181,570 13,172 40.46 58.29

Spohr – LSM141 2012 88,216 6,745 36.85 61.66



specialised lexicography (Fuertes-Olivera and Arribas-Bano 2008), historical

lexicography (Cowie 2008, Adams 2010), computational lexicography (Boas

2009), electronic lexicography (Fuertes-Olivera and Bergenholtz 2011,

Granger and Paquot 2012), and phraseology (Herbst et al. 2011).

3.6 Festschriften sub-corpus

The LEX corpus furthermore contains two Festschriften, as seen in Table 7.

3.7 The LEX corpus: summary

An overview of the various sub-corpora that make up the LEX corpus is shown

in Table 8. The total size of the 3,255 files that make up this lexicographic

reference corpus is 16.5 million tokens, good for about 370 thousand types.6

4. Keywords in the IJL and LEX corpora

Although the IJL and LEX corpora will now each be used independently from

one another, it is noteworthy that the combination of both corpora consists of

nearly four thousand files (3,971), with a total size of 20 million tokens

Table 7: Basic statistics of the Festschriften sub-corpus.

Festschrift Year N_English Tokens Types STTR std. dev.

for B. T. S. Atkins (ed. by

Correard)

2002 19 99,616 11,760 41.84 57.87

for P. W. Hanks (ed. by

De Schryver)

2010 26 115,065 12,536 41.13 57.73

Table 8: Summary statistics of the LEX corpus.

Sub-corpus N_English Tokens %

Journals 1,240 5,926,961 36.02

Manuals 7 1,055,049 6.41

Encyclopaedias 196 722,238 4.39

Proceedings 1,739 5,298,564 32.20

Books 28 3,238,308 19.68

Festschriften 45 214,681 1.30

3,255 16,455,801 100.00



(20,001,410). To the best of our knowledge, this is now the largest dedicated

lexicographic corpus in existence. In order to get a first feel of the main key-

words in both corpora, the IJL corpus and the LEX corpus may each be con-

trasted with the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC) and overall

‘keyness values’ be calculated.7 The result of this exercise is shown in Figures 1

and 2, using the now popular word-cloud format, where the size of a keyword

gives an indication of its keyness value. The keywords have also, quite appro-

priately, been arranged alphabetically. No doubt, the similarities between these

two word clouds indicate that one is (of course) dealing with the same discip-

line. Beyond the similarities, it is the differences that are actually interesting.

The following keywords from the IJL word cloud, for example, are missing

from the LEX word cloud: the corpus lexicographers ‘Atkins’ and ‘Sinclair’,

the learner’s dictionary ‘LDOCE’, and the semantic networks ‘WordNet’ and

‘FrameNet’. This, then, and at a glance, tells us something about the special

focus of IJL as compared to the wider discipline. Conversely, keywords present

in the LEX word cloud but missing in the IJL word cloud tell us something

about the focus in the rest of the discipline. Here we find amongst others: the

American ‘Webster’ and the metalexicographer ‘Wiegand’, the language

‘Afrikaans’, and also ‘slang’ (rather than the standard language) as well as

‘citations’ and ‘quotations’ (rather than (corpus-based/driven) examples).

In the IJL corpus, the data (in English) is nicely distributed across the

years, as may be seen from Figure 3, where one notices only a slight increase

in the number of tokens per year between 1988 and 2012. In as far as the LEX

corpus is representative of the wider lexicographic population (restricted to

communications in English), Figure 4 indicates that the situation is very dif-

ferent for the discipline as a whole, as one notices an exponential rise of the

amount of data produced year after year. In order to be able to compare trends

in the two corpora, it will therefore be necessary to normalize the data. In the

remainder of this article, all frequencies will be normalized counts ‘per 100,000

tokens’.

The word clouds shown in Figures 1 and 2 are of course only the top section

of much longer lists of keywords. In order to work with a unified keyword list,

which would allow direct comparisons, the following procedure was used. Both

the IJL and LEX corpora were momentarily joined and compared to the BNC.

The top 1,000 keywords and their overall keyness values were extracted, and

for each keyword the frequencies per 100,000 tokens were calculated per year,

in the IJL corpus and LEX corpus in turn. The two results are presented in

Addenda 1 and 2, included as Supplementary Material Online. The data in

these addenda constitute the basis for all ensuing graphs. Addenda 1 and 2 of

course contain far more data than can be discussed here, so the reader is invited

to consult these addenda if they wish to study trends not covered in this article.

The overall breakdown of keywords by category is as shown in Table 9.






Figure

1:Word

cloudforthetop100keywordsin

IJL.



Figure

2:Word

cloudforthetop100keywordsin

LEX.



-

20,000

40,000

60,000

80,000

100,000

120,000

140,000

160,000

180,000

200,000

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

# tokens per year in IJL

Figure 3: Number of tokens per year in IJL.

-

200,000

400,000

600,000

800,000

1,000,000

1,200,000

1,400,000

1,600,000

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

# tokens per year in LEX

Figure 4: Number of tokens per year in LEX.

Table 9: Breakdown of keywords by category in the top-1,000 section of the

combined IJL+LEX corpus.

Category N %

General (linguistic) term 402 40.20

Core lexicographic term 274 27.40

Person name (first or surname) 78 7.80

Electronic lexicography term 64 6.40

Language name 57 5.70

Part-of-speech term 41 4.10

Dictionary name 36 3.60

Publisher name 22 2.20

Place name 16 1.60

Various meanings 10 1.00

1,000 100.00



5. Corpus interactionwith the invited contributions

5.1 Ilson’s editorship (1988^1997)

Robert Ilson referred to the exciting (lexicographic) times it was to be around

when the first issue of IJL appeared in 1988. This is also abundantly clear in the

LEX corpus. In honour of IJL’s first editor, let me select two quotes from

Dictionaries, both written as opening lines in reviews of books edited by Ilson

before he took on IJL:

The increasing professionalization of the science, art, and craft of

lexicography is leading not only to better dictionaries but also to more

publications about the field. And the research literature is becoming more

specialized [. . .] (Gold 1985: 288)

If self-reflection is a sign of maturity, lexicography has come of age. To be

sure, one assumes (and hopes) that lexicographers have always thought

about what they were doing, but following Samuel Johnson’s example,

they are doing their thinking increasingly in public. In recent years the

amount and quality of public self-reflection by lexicographers and about

lexicography has increased at such a rate as to suggest the voguish

encomium “a quantum leap.” (Algeo 1986: 262)

In his contribution, Ilson mentions several dictionaries, amongst others the

(then forthcoming) second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

How has the OED been covered in IJL since then? In Figure 5 the trend for the

keyword (abbreviation) ‘OED’ is plotted against the trend for the keywords

(abbreviations) of three other English dictionaries: ‘CED’ (Collins English

Dictionary), ‘BBI’ (The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English) and ‘Roget’

(Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases). Apart from a spike for

Roget, of these four dictionaries the OED has clearly dominated the coverage

in IJL. Figure 6 shows that this is also the pattern in the wider LEX corpus.

The LEX corpus furthermore allows one to look back in time, at the

twenty-five years before IJL, back to the time of Zgusta’s Manual (1971) and

further down to Householder and Saporta’s Problems (1962). Here, and for

these dictionaries, Figure 6 indicates that OED’s dominance has been

permanent.

Ilson also mentions the fragments of Explanatory and Combinatorial

Dictionaries (ECDs) that had already been produced (and would continue to

be produced). Sadly, Figure 7 indicates that, when it was discussed, the ECD

did receive more attention in IJL than in LEX, but it certainly didn’t continue

to receive the attention it deserves.8

Ilson’s tenure as the editor of IJL also coincides with the explosion in the

number of highly successful monolingual learners’ dictionaries for English. The



Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (OALD(CE)) had

already been around since 1974 (with a history going back to 1942), the

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) since 1978, and both

were joined by COBUILD in 1987, also the year LDOCE2 came out—see the

invited contribution by P. Hanks. The year 1995 saw the arrival of a fourth

competitor, the Cambridge International Dictionary of English (CIDE), with

OALD5, LDOCE3 and COBUILD2 all coming out in the same year. These

‘Big Four’ have received ample attention in IJL during that period, see Figure 8;

certainly more than in other lexicographic channels, see Figure 9 (which is

drawn to the same scale). While COBUILD and LDOCE have taken turns

leading in IJL, OALD mostly trailed, and academic interest in CIDE (and its

successor, the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (CALD)) fast petered

out. In contrast, in the LEX corpus COBUILD started to attract attention even

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

180

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

IJL

OED

CED

BBI

ROGET

Figure 5: Trend for four English dictionaries in IJL.

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

OED

CED

BBI

ROGET

LEX

Figure 6: Trend for four English dictionaries in LEX.



before the first edition came out, then quickly shot up to the top spot, and

basically stayed there till this day.

Moving from dictionaries to publishers of dictionaries, one may also study

the trends for keywords like ‘Oxford’, ‘Cambridge’, ‘Longman’, etc. This

is done in Figure 10 for IJL and in Figure 11 for LEX. From this, one

sees that Oxford is by far the biggest publisher for matters lexicographic,

followed by Cambridge and Longman, with Collins a distant fourth.

For the past twenty-five years, this has been the case in both IJL and LEX,

and looking at the earlier period, it is clear that Oxford has always trumped

Cambridge.

Moving to dictionary publishers with their head offices in other countries

than the UK, Figures 12 and 13 give examples for an American, French and

German dictionary publisher each. Observe, first, that the overall impact

(y-axis, i.e. the hits per 100,000 words) for these publishers is much lower

than was the case for the British publishers. Secondly, no true patterns may

0

20

40

60

80

100

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

ECD (Explanatory and Combinatorial Dic�onary)

IJL

LEX

Figure 7: Trend for ECD in IJL and LEX.

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

IJL

COBUILD

LDOCE

OALD(CE)

CIDE / CALD

Figure 8: Trend for the ‘Big Four’ English learners’ dictionaries in IJL.



be observed: all three come and go, with roughly equal attention, both in IJL

and in LEX. Spikes are the result of one-off, detailed treatments of certain

dictionaries from those publishers.

In a third pair of graphs for publishers, one may now also look at publishers

of general lexicographic and linguistic works, as done in Figures 14 and 15. For

both IJL and LEX, lexicographers have consulted and cited more works by

Max Niemeyer than those by Benjamins, De Gruyter, Mouton and Routledge.

This is not entirely surprising: the LSM series (cf. Section 3.5) was published by

Max Niemeyer until 2006. That said, for a relatively new publisher, Benjamins

is doing surprisingly well, and is about to take the lead in IJL, and already has

in LEX. Looking back at how Mouton used to lead, see Figure 15, one cannot

but feel sorry for the merger which produced Mouton de Gruyter, now De

Gruyter Mouton.

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

LEX

COBUILD

LDOCE

OALD(CE)

CIDE / CALD

Figure 9: Trend for the ‘Big Four’ English learners’ dictionaries in LEX.

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

180

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

IJL

OXFORD

CAMBRIDGE

LONGMAN

COLLINS

MACMILLAN

CLARENDON

Figure 10: Trend for British dictionary publishers in IJL.



5.2 Cowie’s editorship (1998^2002)

In his contribution, Tony Cowie recalls that his first step in policy concerned

the languages covered in IJL:

I believed that a stronger emphasis than before should be placed on

dictionaries of major European languages. Although projects featuring

work on classical Greek and Hebrew have not been neglected, articles and

reviews describing dictionaries of French, German, Italian, Spanish and

Russian, dominate the coverage. (Cowie, this issue)

Has this indeed been achieved? And if so, how different is this from the pattern

seen in the wider lexicographic literature of the time? Focusing on single lan-

guages only and merging native with English designations, a total of 38 lan-

guages are found in the top 1,000 keywords. The view for IJL over its full

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

LEX

OXFORD

CAMBRIDGE

LONGMAN

COLLINS

MACMILLAN

CLARENDON

Figure 11: Trend for British dictionary publishers in LEX.

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

IJL

MERRIAM-WEBSTER

LAROUSSE

DUDEN

Figure 12: Trend for an American, French and German dictionary publisher

in IJL.



0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

LEX

MERRIAM-WEBSTER

LAROUSSE

DUDEN

Figure 13: Trend for an American, French and German dictionary publisher

in LEX.

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

IJL

BENJAMINS

NIEMEYER

GRUYTER

MOUTON

ROUTLEDGE

Figure 14: Trend in IJL for publishers of general lexicographic and linguistic

works.

0

5

10

15

20

25

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

LEX

BENJAMINS

NIEMEYER

GRUYTER

MOUTON

ROUTLEDGE

Figure 15: Trend in LEX for publishers of general lexicographic and linguis-

tic works.



twenty-five years is as shown in Figure 16. While languages such as French,

German, Russian, Italian and Spanish (in that order) have indeed received

ample attention from 1998 to 2002 (in the English material), the one language

which of course received more attention than any other is simply English.

Hebrew received as much attention as Russian, and Greek a bit less than

Spanish. However, do note the spikes for Japanese in 1998 and Maori in

2001. Spikes for languages before 1998 include Chinese in 1992 and Japanese

in 1994; spikes after 2002 include Dutch and Greek, both in 2007. For the full

IJL, the top-ten languages are actually: English, French, German, Chinese,

Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Latin and Russian. One can thus confirm

that during Cowie’s tenure dictionaries for major European languages received

some attention, but not truly more than before or after in IJL. What is true is

that less attention went to Chinese.

Moving to the wider lexicographic literature, Figure 17 summarizes the view.

One firstly notices that the attention towards English has been even more

pronounced, especially during the 1970s and 1980s.10 After that, the number

of languages covered on a regular basis is much larger. The ‘floor’ of Figure 17

is indeed much ‘fuller’ than that of Figure 16; this, of course, was also the

1962

19821987

19921997

200220072012

0

100

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300

400

500

600

IJL

Figure 16: Languages most frequently mentioned and/or treated in IJL.9



purpose of the LEX corpus, namely to try and be representative of as much

lexicographic material (written in English) as possible, and thus also of as many

languages as possible. The top-ten languages for the period 1998-2002 are:

English, French, German, Chinese, Sotho, Latin, Italian, Dutch, Afrikaans

and Arabic. Clearly, then, compared to the wider lexicographic literature of

the time, Cowie did indeed manage to keep IJL focused on the so-called major

European languages. The top-ten languages for the entire period (1962-2012) of

the LEX corpus are: English, French, German, Chinese, Spanish, Latin,

Dutch, Afrikaans, Italian and Greek; while the order of the top languages

for the combined IJL and LEX corpora is as seen on the x-axis of

Figures 16 and 17. On the whole, then, languages from Europe, Asia, Africa,

Australasia and the Arab world are covered. Missing are native-American

languages (both South and North). Let this be a wake-up call: why, after all,

is there no South American Association for Lexicography (SAMLEX)?

Cowie devotes the second section of his contribution to the monolingual

learner’s dictionary. That a learner of a new language should get further

Figure 17: Languages most frequently mentioned and/or treated in LEX.



with a monolingual dictionary in that new language, rather than with a bilin-

gual dictionary covering his own and the new language, may intuitively seem

rather awkward, but there is indeed enough evidence by now to support this.

So, merely looking at the number of languages covered in a dictionary, how has

IJL fared over the years, and what happened in the wider lexicographic com-

munity meantime? In Figure 18, the number of dictionary languages as covered

in IJL is shown. Perhaps surprisingly, bilingual dictionaries were, remained and

have continued to be the most popular type in the pages of IJL, followed by

monolingual, multilingual, bilingualized, interlingual and finally semi-bilingual

dictionaries. Figure 19 indicates that this same pattern is seen in the LEX

corpus, with three exceptions (where monolingual dictionaries receive slightly

more attention than bilingual ones): in Zgusta’s Manual, for the year 1989—

two years after the release of COBUILD and LDOCE2 (cf. Section 5.1), and

for the year 2003—the year the ‘new’ CALD as well as LDOCE4 were released,

one year after the release of the newMacmillan English Dictionary for Advanced

Learners (MEDAL), two years after the release of COBUILD3, and three years

after the release of OALD6.

That the various monolingual learners’ dictionaries (for English) received

ample space in both IJL and LEX is now clear, but what about other types

of dictionaries, say dialect, etymological or historical dictionaries? Figure 20

tells us that while the general trend in the wider lexicographic literature for all

matters dialectal is one of waning interest; interest for dialects has actually been

on the rise in IJL. When it comes to all matters etymological, Figures 21 tells us

that this topic has lost appeal over the years in both IJL and the field as a

whole. Finally, when it comes to historical lexicography, Figure 22 tells us that

while the current interest is not overwhelming, it has been rather stable for the

past two decades, with attention to it in IJL and in LEX comparable. LEX also

indicates that historical lexicography used to be far more popular. One type of

dictionary for which both IJL and the wider field show a growing interest, is

0

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300

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

IJL

BILINGUAL

MONOLINGUAL

MULTILINGUAL

BILINGUALISED/-ZED

SEMI-BILINGUAL

INTERLINGUAL

Figure 18: Trend for number of dictionary languages in IJL.



the pedagogical dictionary, as may be deduced from Figure 23. The value on

the y-axis needs to be taken into account, however: for example, the keyword

‘historical’ remains more frequent than ‘pedagogical’.

The third section of Cowie’s contribution deals with phraseology, so, as a

final interaction with Cowie’s text, Figure 24 displays the trend for ‘phrase-

ology/. . .ical’ in IJL and in LEX. It is clear that IJL has taken the lead here,

and the ‘generous coverage given to phraseology in IJL’ Cowie spoke of, is

especially apparent during the middle years of Cowie’s tenure.

5.3 Bogaards’s editorship (2003^2012)

As a fitting capstone to conclude the first twenty-five years of IJL, Paul

Bogaards looked at ways to assess the impact of IJL. As all of us who work

in academia have become aware of, we are being held at gunpoint by the

Impact Factor as calculated by Thomson Reuters—a multi-billion-dollar

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160

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

LEX

BILINGUAL

MONOLINGUAL

MULTILINGUAL

BILINGUALISED/-ZED

SEMI-BILINGUAL

INTERLINGUAL

Figure 19: Trend for number of dictionary languages in LEX.

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20

40

60

80

100

120

140

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

Dialect/-s/-al

IJL

LEX

Trend

Trend

Figure 20: Trend for ‘dialect/-s/-al’ in IJL and LEX.



company which couldn’t care less about languages, let alone lexicography.

Thomson Reuters just happened to land what used to be known as ISI (i.e.

the Institute for Scientific Information), where bibliographic databases were

developed, and where citation indexes were popularised. Whether we like it or

not, we all seem to play along. Here is the current banner on IJL’s home page:

Oxford Journals is pleased to announce that International Journal of

Lexicography has received a 2011 Impact Factor of 1.143, placing it within

the top 20% of journals in Linguistics! (http://ijl.oxfordjournals.org/)

This will be the only exclamation mark in the present article. Bogaards was of

course rightly sceptical:

I hope the time will come soon when we can look back and pity the citation

indexes and impact factors of a foregone era. (Bogaards, this issue)

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100

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

Etymology/…ies/…ical

IJL

LEX

Figure 21: Trend for ‘etymology/. . .ies/. . .ical’ in IJL and LEX.

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

Historical

IJL

LEX

Figure 22: Trend for ‘historical’ in IJL and LEX.




What did IJL have to do to get into that so-called top 20% of linguistics

journals? Simply, be cited a mere 32 times for 28 citable items published in

IJL during the two previous years. That’s equivalent to less than three times per

month. Really? Is this silly little figure really our impact? Of course IJL’s

impact is of a totally different magnitude; it’s just that in the closed system

which Thomson Reuters handles, most of what is really going on, even in terms

of citations, is invisible.

A more realistic picture may be derived from the databases of yet another

commercial company, Google. Their search engine for scholarly literature,

Google Scholar, tries to see as many of the world’s (digital) publications as

possible, and, importantly, allows users to make corrections and to provide

additions. About seventy lexicographers have also started to create a profile

and released their data. What this data shows is that citation patterns are quite

literally Zipfian: very few attract very many citations, and very many attract

very few. As such, Sinclair attracted a massive 14,362 citations, Hanks about

0

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30

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

Pedagogical

IJL

LEX

Figure 23: Trend for ‘pedagogical’ in IJL and LEX.

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10

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30

40

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60

70

80

90

100

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

Phraseology/…ical

IJL

LEX

Figure 24: Trend for ‘phraseology/. . .ical’ in IJL and LEX.



half of that: 6,819, Kilgarriff again about half of that: 4,192, Hartmann half of

that: 2,113, etc. as shown in Figure 25.

Google Scholar also allows one to zoom in on particular scholars, and even

on particular publications. An example is shown in Figure 26, from which one

may deduce that Zgusta’s Manual has been most popular as recently as 2010.

A program which takes Google Scholar data as its input is Harzing’s Publish

or Perish, and with it one can for example calculate the overall impact of IJL,

as shown in Figure 27. This indicates that IJL attracted nearly 10,000 citations

to date (392 per year, 33 per month, more than one each day). Needless to say,

one can then select any other details, for example the citation metrics for the

publications by a single scholar in IJL, as shown in Figure 28.

A different way to look at the impact of the various scholars in lexicography

(and beyond) is to select all surnames from our 1,000 keywords, of which there

are 73, and to set out the sum of their normalised frequencies in a radar chart.

This is exactly what is done in Figure 29, both for IJL and LEX. Starting at

twelve o’clock and going clockwise, the scholars have been placed in descend-

ing keyness order, meaning that non-English names tend to be rated higher as

they do not appear in the BNC. However, for the data in the radar chart the

actual values are used, being the sum of each annual occurrence per 100,000

words. For IJL, summing twenty-five years, Johnson’s impact is by far the

largest, at 773. In the chart then follow Hartmann (281), Zgusta (304),

Hausmann (267), Atkins (489), Sinclair (472), etc. Concurrently, the impact

in LEX is also shown, summing fifty years, with the impact for Johnson cut

short, as it is a massive 1,776. Then follow Hartmann (464), Zgusta (502),

Hausmann (351), Atkins (313), Sinclair (287), etc. Where the lines for IJL

and LEX cross for a particular author, their impacts in the two corpora are

equal. Otherwise the line furthest from the centre has the highest impact. In this

way, one for example sees that the impact for IJL’s three editors, Ilson, Cowie

and Bogaards, has been higher in IJL than in the wider lexicographic literature,

and also that the impact for Hanks in IJL equals his impact in the wider

community, while Fontenelle’s impact is higher in IJL, and Gouws’s impact

is higher in the wider community.

5.4 Hanks and the corpusrevolution

Without computers, there is no corpus revolution. One could therefore assume

that the impact of computers would also be visible in lexicographic corpora.

This is not borne out by the data, as Figure 30 indicates. Apart from some

excitement at the start of the 1980s, it seems as if computers quickly and simply

became a given: no need to mention them—of course we use them. The trend

for ‘corpus/. . .ra’ could hardly be more different, as seen from Figure 31. While

the hits for ‘corpus/. . .ra’ in Householder & Saporta’s Problems, in Zgusta’s

Manual, etc. for the early days, still refer to physical paper corpora, as of 1983



electronic corpora enter the world of lexicography with a bang, through dis-

cussions in Dictionaries of the Brown and LOB corpora. This seems to have

been a false start, however, and one needs to wait for the arrival of COBUILD

in 1987 to truly revolutionize the field. Since then, ever more attention has

indeed gone to corpora. In this, IJL seems to have lagged behind the wider

lexicographic literature a bit. The computer, as an enabling technology, did end

up revolutionizing the very concept of a dictionary, however, moving it out of

the paper world and catapulting it into the electronic world. Concurrently,

looking up words came to be replaced by searching for words. Here too, IJL

has lagged behind the wider lexicographic literature—cf. Figures 32 and 33.

Figure 25: Number of citations for lexicographers at Google Scholar (as on

23 Oct. 2012).



Figure 26: Trend for a particular publication (here Zgusta’s Manual, as on

23 Oct. 2012) in Google Scholar.

Figure 27: Overall impact of IJL, using Harzing’s Publish or Perish.11



In his closing remarks, Patrick Hanks stated emphatically:

Lexicography of the future will surely aim to create electronic tools [. . .]

(Hanks, this issue)

Looking at the trend for keywords like ‘paper’, ‘electronic’, ‘online/on-line’ and

‘CD-ROM’, as done in Figures 34 and 35, reveals, firstly, that ‘CD-ROMs’ as a

Figure 28: Citation metrics for the publications by P. Hanks in IJL, using

Harzing’s Publish or Perish.12

-200

50

300

550

800

WIEGANDJOHNSONHARTMANNZGUSTA

HAUSMANNATKINS

SINCLAIRBERGENHOLTZ

TARP

HANKS

COWIE

GOUWS

SCHRYVER

RUNDELL

FILLMORE

BARNHART

MURRAY

HORNBY

LANDAU

BOGAARDS

ILSON

HEID

KILGARRIFF

NESI

PRINSLOO

BURCHFIELD

HERBST

FONTENELLE

LAUFER

MEL'CUKWIERZBICKA

TONOBÉJOINT

GOVECRAIGIEBOYERJUNIUSLEWBAILEYVARANTOLA

SKEATWELKER

NIELSENSTEIN

REICHMANN

GRIMM

FELLBAUM

PUSTEJOVSKY

CAWDREY

SVENSÉN

CALZOLARI

VOSSEN

FLORIO

MARELLO

APRESJAN

BENSON

LEVIN

DOLEZAL

KURATH

TOMASZCZYK

BLOUNT

LAKOFF

GRANGER

MEER

OSSELTON

MCCREARYQUIRK

CRUSEFUERTES-OLIVERA

STARNESALGEOMCARTHURURDANG

IJL LEX

Figure 29: Impact of the top-scholars in the IJL and LEX corpora (as the

sum of the annual occurrences per 100,000 words).



dictionary medium have never really come off the ground, and secondly, that

‘online’ has already overtaken ‘paper’ in IJL, while ‘online’ and indeed ‘elec-

tronic’ in general have overtaken ‘paper’ in the wider lexicographic community.

The future, then, is already here. Let’s now populate those electronic tools of

the future with the right contents. Hanks himself has given exciting pointers as

to how this could be done.

5.5 Fontenelle and semantic networks

Earlier suggestions as to how the lexicon of a language could be analysed and

structured have been to use (computational) semantic networks. The two most

famous of these networks—WordNet (first proposed in 1985, inspired by psy-

cholinguistic theories of human memory) and FrameNet (since 1997, based on

earlier work on Frame Semantics, a theory of meaning)—even made it into the

word cloud of the top 100 keywords in IJL (cf. Figure 1). Thierry Fontenelle

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1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

Computer

IJL

LEX

Figure 30: Trend for ‘computer’ in IJL and LEX.

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100

150

200

250

300

350

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

Corpus/...ra

IJL

LEX

Figure 31: Trend for ‘corpus/. . .ra’ in IJL and LEX.



made it abundantly clear that these, as well as his own lexical-semantic data-

base enriched with Mel’cukian lexical functions, were indeed adequately cov-

ered in IJL. A study of the IJL and LEX corpora, however, reveals on the one

hand that attention to these semantic networks was not constant but rather

came in phases, and on the other that at any rate, there was far more attention

to them in IJL than in the wider lexicographic literature. See in this regard the

trends displayed in Figures 36 and 37.

Fontenelle also showed that the IJL contributions on WordNet and

FrameNet continue to have an impact, especially in the computational linguis-

tics community. Actually, their impact is even bigger than suggested by

Fontenelle. Firstly, Figure 27 above indicates that, in terms of overall

number of citations attracted, the top 4 IJL papers of all times simply deal

with WordNet and FrameNet. Further down the list, numbers 20 and 21 also

deal with WordNet, and numbers 10, 16 and 18 with FrameNet. Semantic

networks are moreover also covered by numbers 5 (word families) and 6

(SIMPLE).

020406080

100120140160180200220240

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

IJL

SEARCH/-ES

LOOK-UP/-S

Figure 32: Trend for ‘search/-es’ and ‘look-up/-s’ in IJL.

0

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100

120

140

160

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

LEX

SEARCH/-ES

LOOK-UP/-S

Figure 33: Trend for ‘search/-es’ and ‘look-up/-s’ in LEX.



Secondly, viewed from either the WordNet or FrameNet perspective, core

publications on WordNet and FrameNet were also published in IJL. Indeed,

for both projects, the third most frequently-cited publication was published in

IJL, as may be seen from Figures 38 and 39.13 Seeing IJL do so well, sur-

rounded by all those computational linguistics journals and books (ACM,

IEEE, Springer), must certainly be seen as an achievement, even a ‘coup’ on

the part of IJL.

On the other hand, one could lament the fact that IJL hasn’t covered even

more semantic networks. In his contribution Fontenelle suggested MindNet

and Acquilex, to which VerbNet (Fontenelle, personal communication) could

be added—after all, the verb is central to a lexicographer’s concerns, as seen

from Figures 40 and 41. In all fairness to IJL, however, I do believe that with

WordNet and FrameNet, our journal already punched way above its weight.

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1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

IJL

PAPER

ELECTRONIC

ONLINE/ON-LINE

CD-ROM

Figure 34: Trend for ‘paper’, ‘electronic’, ‘online/on-line’ and ‘CD-ROM’ in

IJL.

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100

120

140

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

LEX

PAPER

ELECTRONIC

ONLINE/ON-LINE

CD-ROM

Figure 35: Trend for ‘paper’, ‘electronic’, ‘online/on-line’ and ‘CD-ROM’ in

LEX.



See, for instance, the (tiny) occurrences of MindNet and Acquilex in Google

Book’s multi-billion-word English corpus as shown in Figure 42.

5.6 Gouwsandmetalexicography

I have chosen to refer to ‘metalexicography’ and not to ‘theoretical lexicog-

raphy’. This is a controversial issue, and it is best to take a position right away.

Although I have for many years had some appreciation, and at times even

admiration, for the endeavours of Wiegand and his colleagues, I have grown

increasingly impatient with all those who try to make us believe that there is a

theory of lexicography. In that respect I am a great fan of Bejoint’s latest book,

The Lexicography of English (2010), in which, following nine chapters aver-

aging 42 pages each, he presents his tenth and last on the theory of lexicog-

raphy. Chapter 10 is less than half a page long. Point made. At the other side of

the spectrum one could for example take one of the articles by Wiegand quoted

in the contribution by Rufus Gouws: ‘Elements of a Theory Towards a

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1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

WordNet

IJL

LEX

Figure 36: Trend for ‘WordNet’ in IJL and LEX.

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150

200

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

FrameNet

IJL

LEX

Figure 37: Trend for ‘FrameNet’ in IJL and LEX.



So-called Lexicographic Definition’ (Wiegand 1992). So these are a few elem-

ents only, merely to start going towards something, that is not even called that

something. Seriously. A total of 115 pages are used for that, including four full

pages in the references with just references to . . .Wiegand himself. This is not

even ‘exceptional’: Wiegand (2005) is a 178-page ‘article’ (published in his own

journal). At least Wiegand’s reflections are still based on real data and real

dictionaries. By contrast, the term ‘theory’ in the ludicrously named Modern

Figure 38: Top publications on WordNet, according to Harzing’s Publish or

Perish.

Figure 39: Top publications on FrameNet, according to Harzing’s Publish or

Perish.

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350

400

450

500

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

IJL

VERB/-S

NOUN/-S

ADJECTIVE/-S/ADJ

ADVERB/-S/ADV

PREPOSITION/-S/PREP

PRONOUN/-S

Figure 40: Trend for the main parts of speech in IJL.



Theory of Lexicographic Functions of Bergenholtz and Tarp is a figment of the

imagination. Their data is, quite literally, invented. Three defining texts on the

subject have recently been published: Piotrowski’s (2009) review of Tarp

(2008), Kilgarriff’s (2012) review of Fuertes-Olivera and Bergenholtz (2011),

and Rundell’s (2012) showstopping keynote at the 15th EURALEX congress,

in which he takes the time to politely deconstruct the theoretical farces, from

Scerba to Wiegand to Bergenholtz and Tarp.

That said, the use of the term ‘metalexicography’—as ‘the study of diction-

aries, as artefacts’ (Rundell 2012: 63)—is not really catching on, as may be seen

from Figure 43. Theoretical matters of various kinds and from various discip-

lines are of course discussed, both in IJL and in LEX, as seen in Figure 44.

Also, and on the whole, contributors to IJL are less eager to adopt the terms

proposed in the metalexicographical literature. For example, in IJL the term

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1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

LEX

VERB/-S

NOUN/-S

ADJECTIVE/-S/ADJ

ADVERB/-S/ADV

PREPOSITION/-S/PREP

PRONOUN/-S

Figure 41: Trend for the main parts of speech in LEX.

Figure 42: Semantic networks in Google Books, using the Ngram Viewer.



‘headword’ is preferred over ‘lemma’, see Figure 45, while it is the reverse in the

wider lexicographic literature, see Figure 46.

In his contribution, Gouws points out:

As a journal that has reference works as primary concern IJL has the

obligation to inform a wide-ranging target user group of developments in

this field, and as a mouthpiece of a prominent scientific association like

EURALEX this responsibility should lead to balanced and comprehensive

guidance in terms of both theoretical lexicography and the lexicographic

practice.

No one will dispute that Wiegand’s theories have not been discussed as fre-

quently in IJL as they have been in the wider lexicographic literature; this is

also evident from the corpus data shown in Figure 47. Observe, nonetheless,

the current downward trend in the LEX corpus. Similarly, the work of

0

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4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

20

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

Metalexicography/...ic/...ical

IJL

LEX

Figure 43: Trend for ‘metalexicography/. . .ic/. . .ical’ in IJL and LEX.

0

20

40

60

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100

120

140

160

180

200

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

Theory/...ies/...e�cal

IJL

LEX

Figure 44: Trend for ‘theory/. . .ies/. . .etical’ in IJL and LEX.



Bergenholtz and Tarp has also been more popular outside IJL, as seen in

Figures 48 and 49. IJL does not really stand accused though, as all it did

was lag behind. The current star of Bergenholtz and Tarp is rising in LEX,

as it is in IJL.

The next editor of IJL will have to see whether this is a good development.

Reading through a number of screens’ worth of concordance lines on matters

theoretical in the LEX corpus, I cannot but be reminded of Liberman’s review

of one of the Copenhagen sets of proceedings (which includes contributions by

the theoreticians just mentioned):

Most people tend to repeat things already familiar to the narrow circle of

specialists and thereby ruin the suspense the audience expects from a

scholarly presentation. A look through the lists of references [. . .] reveals

that they are variations on the earlier work by the same authors. This trend

cannot be stopped. The number of researchers is so great and the bulk of

published production—if we take into consideration countless websites—is

so huge that almost no one can hope to be heard, let alone appreciated. But

tireless repetition may do the trick. (Liberman 2008: 79)

6. Assessment

Looking back at IJL’s first twenty-five years, there is indeed enough reason to

be celebrating the anniversary. In their assessments, the three editors—Robert

Ilson, Tony Cowie and Paul Bogaards—have been glowing. IJL went from

strength to strength, and is now arguably the most respected of all lexico-

graphic journals. It may not cover the widest ground (Lexikos does), but this

seems to be a deliberate choice.

The choice to invite one contribution each on corpora, semantic networks

and metalexicography, was not haphazard either. The corpus revolution that

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120

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

IJL

HEADWORD/-S

LEMMA/-S/-TA

Figure 45: Trend for ‘headword/-s’ vs. ‘lemma/-s/-ta’ in IJL.



0

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100

120

140

160

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

LEX

HEADWORD/-S

LEMMA/-S/-TA

Figure 46: Trend for ‘headword/-s’ vs. ‘lemma/-s/-ta’ in LEX.

0

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40

50

60

70

80

90

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

Wiegand

IJL

LEX

Figure 47: Trend for ‘Wiegand’ in IJL and LEX.

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

Bergenholtz

IJL

LEX

Figure 48: Trend for ‘Bergenholtz’ in IJL and LEX.



swept through the discipline at the time IJL was started is still ongoing; in

actual fact, corpus analyses by lexicographers are now not only informing but

plainly at the basis of entirely new linguistic theories. The most important one,

no doubt, Patrick Hanks’s (forthcoming) Theory of Norms and Exploitations.

The trends analyses show that IJL has been in tune with the wider lexico-

graphic literature when it comes to corpus-driven lexicography.

Semantic networks such as WordNet and FrameNet found a fruitful breed-

ing ground in IJL. Here, IJL was not only ahead of the wider lexicographic

literature but even a key player surrounded by journals and publishers primar-

ily dealing with computational linguistics. Thierry Fontenelle, who did so much

valuable work on his own semantic networks, was indeed the ideal lexicog-

rapher to summarize all the issues for us.

The deliberate choice not to go after so-called lexicographical theories has

meant that IJL has been lagging behind the wider lexicographic literature in

this respect. It remains to be seen if the next twenty-five years of IJL will see a

change here. Of course theoreticians are welcome to send in their thoughts, and

provided that they adhere to formal criteria (like length) and basic experimen-

tal setups (there must be some data involved), I am quite confident that their

manuscripts will be considered. After all, the power of a journal editor should

not be overrated: His (or Hers) is mainly a steering role, with only the occa-

sional special issue to break through the receptive role of being dependent on

what is submitted. This privilege was taken up here, and I thank Rufus Gouws

for developing the metalexicographic aspects.

The success of a journal also depends on the quality of the submitted manu-

scripts, as well as the selfless devotion of the editor’s team of adjudicators. If

IJL has been the success it has been, it is, then, thanks to the many contribu-

tors, adjudicators, and editors (not forgetting the reviews editors). Therefore,

to all of them, happy 25th birthday.

0

10

20

30

40

50

1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012

Tarp

IJL

LEX

Figure 49: Trend for ‘Tarp’ in IJL and LEX.



Online versus print: Note that all figures can be seen in colour at International

Journal of Lexicography online, and that the supplementary material is also

available there.

Notes

1 STTR stands for ‘standardized type/token ratio’, here set as the running average

for every 1,000 words, with std. dev. its ‘standard deviation’. In simple terms this value

shows the number of ‘new’ orthographic words in every 1,000 words, and as such

implies something about lexical density. This value tends to be higher in texts by

native speakers and lower in translated material. In texts by non-English natives, the

values typically lie in-between.

2 The collection of the ASIALEX proceedings is ongoing. Currently about 60% has

been ‘recreated’ from extant paper copies.

3 The collection of the COMPLEX proceedings is near-final, with currently about

90% that has been ‘recreated’.

4 The actual proceedings publication years are recorded in the ‘Period / Year’

column, rather than the years in which the conferences took place.

5 LSM1 is also the first volume of the EURALEX proceedings, and is thus included

there (cf. Section 3.4).

6 At this point it is appropriate to thank all those who have helped with the collection

of the raw data for the lexicographic reference corpus, either by providing some of the

texts (on paper or in electronic form), or by arranging permissions with publishers.

These are Riette Ruthven and Tanja Harteveld for Lexikos, Sue Atkins, Michael

Rundell and Bo Svensen for their manuals, Geoffrey Williams and Simon Krek for

the EURALEX proceedings, Amy Chi, Hai Xu, Vincent Ooi and Kaoru Akasu for the

ASIALEX proceedings, Julia Pajzs for the COMPLEX proceedings, Sylviane Granger

for the eLEX proceedings, and Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera, Sylviane Granger, Ilan

Kernerman and Robert Lew for various books. I would also like to thank Minah

Nabirye for her help with the digitization of some of the data. All other aspects of

the corpus building, processing and analysis have been undertaken by me. Building this

corpus is an ongoing process, started a number of years ago, with the journal of the

Iwasaki Linguistic Circle, Lexicon, next in line to be digitized (with thanks to Kaoru

Akasu and Satoru Uchida for sending me paper copies).

7 The frequencies of all the types in the IJL and LEX corpora on the one hand, and

the frequencies of all the types in the BNC on the other hand, were cross-tabulated and

overall keyness values calculated using the log-likelihood statistic, with minimum fre-

quency set at 3, and maximum probability at 0.000001. A stoplist was used to filter out

the academic register as well as all non-English function words (typically from examples

and reference lists).

8 In addition to the keyword (abbreviation) ‘ECD’, the keyword ‘combinatoire’ was

also added to this graph, from the French title of this dictionary series (Dictionnaire

explicatif et combinatoire du francais contemporain).

9 In order to be able to compare IJL with LEX, the x-axes (languages) of Figures 16

and 17 are equal. All mentioned languages indeed occur in both corpora, except for

Lusoga, which is absent from IJL. (It is mentioned in the EURALEX Newsletters,

however, but these are not part of this corpus.)




10 Three values for English have actually been cut short, to enable a straightforward

comparison of Figures 16 and 17: The value for English is a massive 1,197 occurrences

per 100,000 words in 1973 (due to the topic of the single source: Wells 1973), 650 in

1981, and 726 in 1983. For 1987 it is 599.

11 Observe that Google Scholar, and thus also Harzing’s Publish or Perish,

over-count the number of articles (cf. Table 1, where we listed a maximum of 818

‘items’, while there are 930 ‘papers’ here). Despite the ‘noise’, both these tools are

very valuable.

12 Some of the over-counts are of course hard to spot for machines, such as Hanks’s

review of MWALED in 2009: a review with an extra title (i.e. ‘Common sense blossoms

in Springfield, MA’).

13 The ‘ranks’ in Figures 38 and 39 are the positions in which Google Scholar returns

the publications. So, for FrameNet, the IJL publication is in second position. For

WordNet it is (remains) in third.

References

A. Dictionaries and encyclopaedias

BBI = The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English (1st edition 1986, 2nd edition 1997,

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CALD = Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (continuation of CIDE; 1st edition

2003, ed. P. Gillard; 2nd edition 2005, ed. E. Walter; 3rd edition 2008, ed. E. Walter).

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CED = Collins English Dictionary = Collins Dictionary of the English Language (1st

edition 1979, ed. P. Hanks et al.; 11th edition 2011, ed. G. Breslin). London: William

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CIDE = Cambridge International Dictionary of English (1st edition 1995, ed. P. Procter;

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COBUILD1 = Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1st edition 1987, ed.

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COBUILD2 = Collins COBUILD English Dictionary (2nd edition 1995, ed. J. M.

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COBUILD3 = Collins COBUILD English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (3rd edi-

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ECD = Explanatory and Combinatorial Dictionary = Dictionnaire Explicatif et

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