What do you think of the relation between lexicography and
linguistics?
叶慧娟
Nowadays, especially in the era of information revolutionary,
lexicography without the guidance of linguistic theories is unimaginable.
With the development of society, the relation between lexicology and
linguistics are becoming more and more closely. Next, I will discuss the
relation between the two subjects in three perspectives.
Ⅰ the present state of their relationship
Lexicography and the sub-branch of linguistics — lexicology
have the same research area, both two focus on vocabulary description.
Consequently, in narrow sense, lexicography is “applied” branch of
lexicology. In broad sense, since the methodology and principles of
general linguistics (or theoretical linguistics) which can provide all kinds
of language research with the common framework can be applied to
lexicography. In conclusion, lexicography also belongs to the category of
applied linguistics in broad sense.
Ⅱ The relation between lexicography and linguistics throughout
the history
The interaction between lexicography and linguistics has a long
history. Linguists and lexicographers looked down upon each other in the
earlier history. On the one hand, lexicographers were regarded as impure
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linguists, excluding the academic circle of linguistics. The reasons lie in
the following aspects: first, dictionary was regarded as a commercial
product, an artifact that had not changed much since its origins. Second,
dictionary was seen as impure by-product of linguistics. Third, as a book
about words, it shared the relative absence of prestige of lexis and
semantics in the earlier history. Moreover, many linguists weren’t
interested in dictionaries, and thought it wasn’t worth making academic
research on lexicography. On the other hand, lexicographers and
dictionary publishers thought linguistic theories were not easily be
applied to the practice of lexicography. As time went on, in the forties and
fifties, the interest of linguists in the general-purpose dictionary began to
increase everywhere. It became less and less unusual then to study
dictionary, to write about them, and even to co-operate in lexicographical,
or pre-lexicographical work. Some lexicographers had become conscious
that linguistics could play an important role in the improvement of
dictionaries. Some publishers turned to the help of linguists. The case in
point is that American publishers, or at least some of them, had had
linguists working for them, as we have seen: Leonard Bloomfield,
Charles C. Fries, and Mitford M. Mathews all once sat on the editorial
committee of ACD. Yet the participation of linguists in lexicographical
projects was not entirely unproblematic when they contacted at the
beginning. The relations between the linguists of the academic world and
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the lexicographers are now intense in the English-speaking world, and go
both directions. The many conferences on lexicography are attended by
linguists as well as lexicographers. Several well-known linguists such as
William Labov, McCawley, Charles Fillmore, and Randolph Quirk have
published papers or books on dictionaries. Some have even been closely
involved in the compilation of dictionaries such as David Crystal, John
Sinclair, etc. At the same time; many practicing lexicographers are expert
metalexicographers or linguists: Patrick Hanks, Robert Ilson, etc.
Although commercial works of reference have inevitably benefited in
terms of quality from their academic connection, and although academics
have also benefited financially from their commercial connections,
certain resentment is still detectable on the part of scholars.
The relation between lexicography and linguistics lies in two
aspects: first, compilation of every dictionary adopts certain linguistic
theory more or less. All the dictionaries of the nineteenth century were
based on the great tradition of history linguistics. In the 1960s, some
dictionaries were clearly influenced by structuralist linguistics, especially
in France. French lexicographers were trying to treat the lexicon as a
‘structure’, and thought that the role of the dictionary was to clarify the
relations between words. In the USA, the views of structuralist linguists
on lexis were different, at least if Bloomfield is taken as the main
influence. As for British lexicographers, they were characteristically
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restrained in their adherence to the structuralist dogma. The influence of
transformational and generative grammar on dictionary-making has been
even more limited, and this comes as no surprise, since many
transformationalists said that their theory had little to offer to
lexicography. The interests of linguists for lexis were renewed a few
decades ago as a reaction against those theories that had little to say about
lexis and semantics.
Lexicography has been seen as a special subject since the twentieth
century, why? It is, to some extent, relevant to the development of
linguistic theories. Linguistics is a scientific area whose object is
language; its history can be traced back to the ancient India and ancient
Greek. At that time, some scholars observed that there existed some
regularity among languages. For example, there were some similarities or
regularities between “phonetics” and “meaning” or “language” and
“writing”. But when did linguistics originate from? We don’t know
exactly. Whereas modern linguistics began at the beginning of the
twentieth century; its representative is the Course in General Linguistics
in 1916, whose writer is the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
Throughout the history of linguistics development, nineteenth century is a
stage in which historical linguistics developed prosperously, whereas the
twentieth century is the beginning of modern linguistics. Two important
stages of lexicographic development —
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nineteenth century and
twentieth century are identical to the two important stages of linguistic
development.
ⅢFuture perspective:
To sum up, contemporary lexicography and linguistics have mingled
together inevitably. Lexicographers can’t deny the theories of linguists, at
the same time, many viewpoints of linguists are formed through the
compilation of dictionaries.
Looking back on the past two decades, we realize that lexicography is
not just pure experience subject any more. The relationship between
lexicography and the theory of linguistics is becoming more and more
closely. Some important linguistic schools in the history such as
descriptive
linguistics,
history
linguistics,
experience
linguistics
(including cognitive linguistics), psycholinguistics and dialectology and
so on have played powerful impacts on the practice of lexicography.
Whether lexicography should absorb and draw on the research
results of linguistic theories or not is not a problem nowadays. The key
point lies in that how should lexicography treat the research results of
linguistic theories correctly. Although contemporary semantics has little
influence on dictionary, the exploration of semantics on semantic
classification, word meaning and semantic features probably becomes the
most promising aspect in lexicography in the future.
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