Dictionaries and Language Learners

DICTIONARIES AND LANGUAGE LEARNERSI

DICTIONARIES AND LANGUAGE LEARNERS

DICTIONARIES AND LANGUAGE LEARNERSII

INTRODUCTION III

PHILIPPE HUMBLÉ

DICTIONARIES AND LANGUAGE LEARNERS

HAAG + HERCHEN VERLAG

DICTIONARIES AND LANGUAGE LEARNERSIV

CIP-Titelaufnahme der Deutschen Bibliothek

HUMBLÉ, Philippe:Dictionaries and Language Learners/Philippe Humblé. – Frankfurt amMain:Haag und Herchen, 2001.

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Every author may aspire to praise, thelexicographer can only hope to escapereproach, and even this negative rec-

ompense has been granted to very few.

Johnson in the Preface to the EnglishDictionary.

Voor Fernand Humblé, In memoriam

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INTRODUCTION VII

Table of Contents

Introduction .......................................................................................15

CHAPTER 1 DICTIONARIES, HISTORY ANDLEARNERS’ NEEDS..........................................................................29

1. The History of Dictionaries ................................................... 292. Learner’s Dictionaries .......................................................... 333. Bilingual Dictionaries ........................................................... 364. Bilingualised Dictionaries ..................................................... 375. The Longman Language Activator ......................................... 38

CHAPTER 2 REVIEW OF LITTERATURE.........................................411. Dictionary Use and Users – Questionnaires and Experiments ... 41

1. Questionnaires ................................................................. 422. Criticism of Questionnaires ................................................ 433. Controlled Experiments..................................................... 454. Atkins and Varantola ........................................................ 465. Hilary Nesi’s Research on Examples................................... 48

2. Dictionaries and Computers .................................................. 503. The Need for a New Kind of Research ................................... 53

CHAPTER 3 EXAMPLES: THE CORE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGELEXICOGRAPHY...............................................................................55

1. General Considerations ........................................................ 551. The Research on Examples................................................ 552. Types of Examples ........................................................... 583. The Function of Examples ................................................. 614. Examples for Decoding and Examples for Encoding.............. 61

2. Examples in Learner’s Dictionaries. The Problem of Collocationand Syntax. ............................................................................ 62

1. Classification.................................................................... 622. Decoding......................................................................... 633. Encoding......................................................................... 654. Requirements for examples................................................ 69

3. Cobuild and Authentic vs. Made-Up Examples........................ 781. The Defence of ‘Authentic Language’ ................................. 792. Criticisms of Cobuild and the Authentic Examples Policy ...... 803. Corpora........................................................................... 814. The Didactic Point of View ................................................ 81

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4. Examples in Bilingual Dictionaries. ....................................... 841. The Examples for Road in Collins Spanish-English ............... 862. The Examples for Road in Oxford-Hachette......................... 93

CHAPTER 4 AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO FOREIGNLANGUAGE LEXICOGRAPHY.......................................................... 97

1. Decoding.......................................................................... 1001. Morphology and Multi-Word Items ................................... 1032. Idioms and Collocations .................................................. 1043. Polysemy....................................................................... 1064. Including the Context: Two Experiments. .......................... 114

2. Encoding.......................................................................... 1231. Introduction................................................................... 1242. Encoding for Beginners................................................... 1243. Encoding for Advanced Learners ..................................... 131

CONCLUDING REMARKS .............................................................. 161Glossary ............................................................................... 165Appendixes .......................................................................... 170Bibliography ......................................................................... 189

INTRODUCTION IX

List of figures

Fig. 1 Examples for road in Longman....................................................... 66Fig. 2 Examples for the first literal sense of road in Oxford Wordpower....... 67Fig. 3 Examples illustrating the literal meaning of road in Cobuild2. ........... 68Fig. 4 Examples for take a stand retrieved from the Cobuild Collocations CD71Fig. 5 Cobuild2 examples for indulge. ...................................................... 72Fig. 6 Cobuild2 examples for indulge. ...................................................... 72Fig. 7 Longman examples for indulge. ...................................................... 73Fig. 8 Cambridge examples for indulge..................................................... 73Fig. 9 List of the examples for road in Collins Spanish English Dictionary.... 87Fig. 10 Classification of the examples according to their literal or figurative use

(the indications found in the dictionary are in parentheses). .............. 88Fig. 11 Division of the examples according to their translatability. ............... 89Fig. 12 Classification of the road examples according to the audience (English-

Spanish side)................................................................................. 90Fig. 13 Classification of the camino examples according to the audience

(English-Spanish side).................................................................... 91Fig. 14 Decoding problems of beginning learners. ................................... 102Fig. 15 Collocates of take on the Cobuild Collocations CD-ROM. .............. 105Fig. 16 Translations of lead according to co-text and context. ................... 108Fig. 17 Example grid of the entry lead in an electronic dictionary. ............ 110Fig. 18 Example grid of the entry break in an electronic dictionary. .......... 111Fig. 19 Collocation tree for break. .......................................................... 112Fig. 20 Unknown words in: ‘El robo de ordenadores portátiles aumentó de

forma significativa.’ ..................................................................... 115Fig. 21 Words experienced as hard by the test subject in the first chapter of

Don Quixote. .............................................................................. 116Fig. 22 Least frequent words in Herald Tribune article on Desert Storm.... 119Fig. 23 Semantic field of ‘modern warfare’ extracted from a Herald Tribune

article on ‘Desert Storm.’ ............................................................. 120Fig. 24 Scheme of an encoding dictionary based on the sequence of a typical

look-up. ...................................................................................... 123Fig. 25 Construir in the Oxford Spanish Dictionary. ................................. 135Fig. 26 Demander in Oxford-Hachette.................................................... 137Fig. 27 Illustrative table of a few word frequencies indicated in number of

diamonds, and (between brackets) number of senses. ..................... 138Fig. 28 Improve in Longman Language Activator. ................................... 141Fig. 29 Man in Webster’s Thesaurus. ..................................................... 145Fig. 30 Man in an L2 learner-oriented thesaurus. .................................... 146Fig. 31 Examples for house in the Oxford Wordpower. ............................ 154

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Fig. 32 Cobuild2 examples for the first sense of house. ............................154Fig. 33 Impetus in Oxford Wordpower....................................................155Fig. 34 Five examples for impetus in the Grolier Encyclopaedia................156Fig. 35 Examples for impetus in Cobuild2...............................................156Fig. 36 Five examples for impetus from the Cobuild CD-ROM. .................157

INTRODUCTION XI

Preface

In 1984, G. Stein stated that “Dictionaries are obviously written fortheir users. We therefore need much more research on the dictionaryuser, his needs, his expectations and his prejudices.” Adopting theuser's perspective is indeed a praiseworthy undertaking, because it is alltoo often neglected.

With the publication of Dictionaries and Language Learners, we finallyhave an innovative manual of pedagogical lexicography, written by someonewho is not only a theoretical lexicographer but also a practitioner and an ex-perienced language teacher, thoroughly familiar with the problems and needsof language learners.

Elaborating a new model for a foreign language learner's dictionary isnot an easy task. To be able to conduct this research and “to play the role ofinterface between theoretically oriented lexicology and a more practicallymotivated lexicography,” as Hartmann puts it, one needs to combine severalqualities:

– A sound knowledge of lexicology and lexicography;– A rich didactic experience, which enables one to anticipate the user’sproblems and needs;– A fair command of several and preferably very different foreign lan-guages, as diverse as Spanish, French, Dutch and Japanese, for in-stance. One needs to have experienced what it means to learn a foreignlanguage, to struggle with vocabulary, verbal forms, modes and tenses,collocations, idiomatic expressions, false friends or cases of "deceptivetransparency,” to use B. Laufer's terminology;– A wide-ranging experience with dictionary and corpus use.

It is also understood that a considerable and representative corpus is ofparamount importance. In fact, even today too many dictionary authors areonly, more or less commercial, dictionary compilers, with limited didacticand foreign language experience.

In contrast, Philippe Humblé is an experienced teacher and researcheras well as a dictionary maker –he is at present developing a Dicionario de UsoPortuguês-Espanhol. Unlike some well-meaning dictionary compilers, he rig-orously considers the didactic and practical implications as well as the theo-retical principles and models. This is why his work provides us with so manyuseful new insights and proposals.

Of course, we all share the author's discontent with many current refer-ence works. This "déficit dictionnairique" (dictionary deficit), as it is some-

DICTIONARIES AND LANGUAGE LEARNERSXII

times called, inevitably leads the user to a "dépit dictionnairique" (dictionarydiscontent). Every attempt to improve dictionaries is therefore to be ap-plauded.

As Cowie points out, dictionaries should be designed “with a specific setof users in mind, for their specific needs,” and Humblé very rightly de-nounces the hybrid character of many existing dictionaries, which are oftenmainly commercial undertakings. This is why I think it is so helpful to makesound distinctions and innovative suggestions, as the author does. He alsofully explores the practical consequences of his suggestions, both on the mac-rostructural and microstructural level, monolingual versus bilingual diction-aries, receptive versus productive functions of a dictionary, beginning versusadvanced learners, authentic versus made up and controlled examples, theneed for a good classification of examples, the role of definitions, examples,and translation, the need to find ways of exploiting the staggering potential ofelectronic dictionaries, which makes the traditional distinction between gen-eral purpose dictionaries, dictionary of synonyms etc. completely obsolete,the importance of the qualitative approach and the need to privilege intro-spection and close-reading, the need to explore metaphors, to devote moreattention to collocations, among others.

At the end of this book, the author states: “With this book I intended tomake a contribution to improving dictionaries which I hope may have somepractical consequence,” the author states at the end of his book. It indeed isa substantial contribution because quite a lot of these insights have alreadybeen applied to the semi- multilingual reception and production oriented dic-tionnaire d’apprentissage published recently (Dictionnaire d’Apprentissage duFrançais des Affaires DAFA) as well as to one currently under development(Dictionnaire d’Apprentissage du Français Langue Etrangère ou SecondeDAFLES) at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium.

For many other lexicographers and dictionary- makers this book will bean invaluable guide in exploring new horizons in the field of pedagogical lexi-cography.

Jean BinonKatholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)

BIBLIOGRAPHYBinon J., Verlinde S., Van Dyck J., Bertels A. 2000 Dictionnaire d’Apprentissage duFrançais des Affaires, Paris, DidierBertels A., Binon J., Selva T., Verlinde S., Dictionnaire d’Apprentissage du FrançaisLangue Etrangère ou Seconde, electronic dictionary on line (to appear)

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Acknowledgements

When time comes to write the acknowledgements, one is surprised tosee what an extraordinary number of people have in some way contrib-uted to bring a relatively modest undertaking like this to a happy end-ing. First of all I would like to thank Prof. Malcolm Coulthard of theUniversity of Birmingham, UK, who provided me with a few of the fun-damental insights which lay at the basis of this research. I also particu-larly appreciated the help and criticisms of my former colleague in Bel-gium, Prof. Jean Binon of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in whom Ifound a kindred spirit, not only in terms of lexicography. I also want tospecially thank Liz Potter from Cobuild for reading and commenting onthe text of this book. Prof. José Luiz Meurer’s help of the UniversidadeFederal de Santa Catarina was decisive in the later stages of my re-search.

A number of people read all or parts of this book and assisted mewith their criticisms. I would like to thank Gloria Gil, Silvana Serraniand Christine Everley. Special thanks go to my Japanese teachers, inBrazil and in Britain: Tsukamoto Chitose, Hukamachi Hideyo and Ki-mura Mutsuko. I am furthermore indebted to the people at Cobuild whoassisted me so well during the fifteen months in which I had the pleas-ure to be their guest. Special thanks go to Gwyneth Fox who made mystay possible, to Rosamund Moon with whom I had many a fruitful dis-cussion, and the whole Cobuild team now unfortunately scatteredaround the four corners of lexicography, particularly Ramesh Krishna-murthy, Ceri Hewit, Roz Combley, Laura Wedgeworth, Tim Lane, GillFrancis, John Todd and Mick Murphy. I am much obliged to PaulMeara whose hospitality and good advice I was able to enjoy while hisguest in Swansea. I am also very grateful to Hillary Nesi who providedme with an electronic copy of several of her publications.

I would like to thank my colleagues at the Universidade Federal deSanta Catarina for having taken over my classes while I was working onthis research: Alai Garcia Diniz, Liliana Reales de Ruas, Luizete Gui-marães Barros, Rafael Camorlinga, Vera Aquino, and Walter CarlosCosta. I would also like to thank the CNPq for the scholarship which al-lowed me to spend a year at Birmingham University in excellent condi-tions.

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Finally, the encouragement provided by Walter Carlos Costa,Werner Heidermann, Elena Langdon, Paulo Iervolino and my wife Sil-vânia Carvalho were decisive to see this book through completion.

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INTRODUCTION

This book was written as a response to a personal problem: my dissatis-faction with dictionaries in regards to helping learners to write andspeak in a foreign language. As a speaker of a minority language,trapped between some of the world’s major languages, I have alwaysbeen obliged to express myself in a language that is not mine, and prac-tice applies to the present book. As a Dutch-speaking Belgian I havebeen teaching Spanish since 1984 at the Universidade Federal de SantaCatarina (Brazil). About eight years ago my Mexican colleague RafaelCamorlinga and I started compiling a Portuguese-Spanish dictionary thatwould help to solve our students’ problems. Theirs was not so much aproblem of decoding as of encoding. They were perfectly able to makeuse of bilingual or monolingual dictionaries to solve problems of com-prehension in Spanish, but were much less successful when attemptingto express themselves in this language. Dictionaries were not as helpfulas one would expect them to be.

Indeed, it was not until recently that dictionaries started to addressthe issue of encoding. The reason for this is easy to understand. Untilthe 1950’s people had little contact with foreign languages other thanthrough books. Languages were learned to be used passively. After WWII this trend was reversed and learners discovered new language teach-ing methods and new supporting materials such as dictionaries. Butwriting a dictionary is not an overnight task and for the last 50 yearsdictionaries have been evolving rather slowly. The burden of history anda reasonable resistance to change have undoubtedly played some part inthis. Lexicographers understandably have the tendency to improve on


what already exists, and learners, on their part, are reluctant to acceptdictionaries that do not conform to their expectations. Dictionaries areindeed an institutionalised tool, such as a telephone list or a recipebook, which everybody expects to be able to use without any specificpreparation.

However, apart from this, I believe there is another reason whydictionaries are now quite similar to what they were some 100 years agoin spite of recent technological innovations: dictionaries have not yetsolved the problem of encoding because their authors have no clear un-derstanding of what encoding represents from the point of view of theuser. Decoding is fairly straightforward. Materially it is a one-step op-eration. It involves a few mental operations after consulting the diction-ary, such as adapting a translational equivalent to the context in whichthe unknown word was found. This, however, is not the lexicographer’sconcern. Encoding, on the other hand, still involves several materialsteps. The process consists of: translating the item; having an idea of theregister of the word and its syntactical, pragmatical and other con-straints. These are operations which at present still imply looking for in-formation in different places. Research is required to understand thenature of all these processes in order to design a tool that adapts tothem, yet there is no consensus on how to conduct such research. Theunconvincing outcome of some of the research already done might beone of the reasons why dictionaries have not drastically changed andwhy publishing companies, with some exceptions, are hesitant to embarkon radically innovating projects.

Researchers have called for studying how dictionaries are used. Ifthey succeeded in discovering how and what words are looked up, theywould be able to define a dictionary’s necessary characteristics that arecurrently absent. The question is: how does one discover what the proc-ess of encoding implies?

Over the last 30 years or so, research in the field of foreignlanguage lexicography has involved a remarkable interest in dictionaryusers’ studies. Until now, this research has been done by means of testsand questionnaires. These are quantifiable and yield results that can beput into figures and statistics. There is no question that this kind ofresearch is valuable, but it has its limits. There is a pressing need for amore qualitative approach, consisting of introspection on the part of the

INTRODUCTION 17

researcher, and a careful analysis of actual dictionaries in order todetermine their flaws. This book intends to be a sample of suchqualitative research.

In the first chapter of this book, I state that foreign language lexi-cography aims at helping learners with decoding and encoding but thatemphasis has now shifted from decoding to encoding. In order to adaptto this new trend, it is important to discover the precise needs of dic-tionary users. I suggest that the relative lack of understanding of the is-sue is due to inadequate research techniques.

In the second chapter, I situate foreign language dictionaries in ahistorical perspective. Although not very suited for encoding, bilingualdictionaries still fulfil an obvious need. This is not the case of monolin-gual dictionaries, which serve ideological as well as linguistic needs.Through learner's dictionaries, these ideological elements infiltrated thefield of foreign language lexicography.

In the third chapter of this book, I briefly review the literature onforeign language dictionaries. I concentrate on the research done ondictionary use and users.

In the fourth chapter, I present my own qualitative kind of researchcentred on the issue of examples, which I consider central in lexicogra-phy. When I examine a set of different dictionaries no clear examplespolicy emerges from most of them, and in others, examples are not util-ised to their full extent. Finally, I analyse the question of authentic ex-amples as opposed to made-up ones.

In the final chapter I outline a new kind of dictionary. The recom-mendations and suggestions I make take into account the capabilities ofmodern computers, but are not dictated by them. So much so that mysuggestions can be of some use for compiling paper dictionaries as well.First I make a basic distinction between the decoding and the encodingpart of the dictionary. I then consider both these activities from the pointof view of beginning and advanced learners respectively. I discuss theutility of labels, synonyms, examples and definitions for the disam-biguation of translation options in the decoding process. In the case ofencoding, which I consider more difficult, I first discuss how learnerscan choose their item, then how they can learn to use it. Here again ex-amples play an important role.


The bulk of this book was concluded in 1997 as the result of adoctoral research project. For this edition, I reviewed more recent lit-erature, updated the bibliography and changed the text incorporatingquotations wherever I found it relevant.

Objectives and Hypothesis

The purpose of this book is to formulate suggestions to improve diction-aries for foreign languages learners by means of qualitative research thatanalyses existing dictionaries, on one hand, and, on the other, thelearner.

I hope the outcome of my research will lead to an improvement offoreign language dictionaries. While electronic methods of storage anddata retrieval are constantly on my mind, as I am convinced that thefuture of the dictionary lies in the digital world, the suggestions I willformulate have some possible application to printed dictionaries as well.

My primary data are dictionaries, of which a full list can be foundin the bibliography at the end of this book. On a few occasions, I testedsubjects at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina and at Cobuild,where I spent a year of research, but the process only increased my lackof confidence in tests.

I considered three main categories of dictionaries: bilingual,learner’s, and native speaker’s. The first two categories are the ones mostdirectly concerned with foreign language learners, whereas I includenative speaker’s dictionaries mainly because of their relationship tolearner’s dictionaries. I chose these dictionaries based on the languagesof which I have at least a minimal command. Furthermore, I decided tostudy Japanese so that I could personally experience what it is like touse a dictionary as an absolute beginner.

Nevertheless, most attention was dedicated to reference works inEnglish since English is allegedly the most studied language in theworld. Accordingly, more people learn it and more people work on im-proving English dictionaries. Additionally, some types of dictionariesonly exist in English.

Tests and Questionnaires

After examining the literature on dictionaries I realized that there is cur-rently no agreement on a proper methodology for the analysis of user

INTRODUCTION 19

needs. Several methods have been used in this area, none of themleading to very conclusive results. When reading an article by HilaryNesi “The role of illustrative examples in productive dictionary use”(1996), which I will discuss later in detail, it occurred to me that re-search in the field is so unconvincing because current research methodsare flawed. After coming to some very unexpected results with a test ondictionary examples, Nesi herself suggests that shifting from quantitativeto qualitative methods could be a more reliable way of conducting re-search on the topic. In her own words:

Further investigations of the value of examples in learner’s dictionary entrieswill need to develop a more sensitive method of measuring almost impercep-tible developments in word knowledge resulting from dictionary consultation.Qualitative rather than quantitative methods may prove more appropriate forthis purpose. (Nesi, 1996:205)

Still, interestingly I was unable to find any concrete reference tothis kind of qualitative research in Nesi’s latest book The Use and Abuseof Learner’s Dictionaries (Nesi, 2000). This seems to indicate that thisapproach has still not been undertaken.

In my view, most experimental quantitative research on dictionariesdepends too much on personal decisions, and therefore cannot have anentirely objective basis and yields only the forecast results. This is truefor tests as well as for questionnaires. Indeed, sometimes one kind of re-search contradicts the other, even if both seem equally well supportedby statistics and percentages (Harvey and Yuill, 1992, contradictingLaufer, 1992). As is secondarily shown by research in closely relatedareas such as foreign language acquisition (Larsen-Freeman, D. andLong M. H., 1991), little is gained by applying methods borrowed fromthe natural sciences to what is, to a large extent, a social science. I shallexpand on this briefly.

It is my experience that questionnaires tell us either what subjectsthink they do when they consult a dictionary, or what the researcher al-ready knew they did. Researchers tend to ask questions that are eithertoo obvious or too difficult, and the subjects are either unable or reluc-tant to tell the truth1.

1 Malinowski’s ‘oral questionnaires’ in The sexual Life of Savages in North-Western

Melanesia (1929) are both entertaining and instructive reading on the subject. At


Tests or controlled experiments, on the other hand, seem more ob-jective, but in fact they are not. So many variables must be taken intoaccount that the results must be questioned. Tests are reliable only whenasking specific and well-circumscribed research questions such as ‘cansubjects notice the difference between made-up and authentic exam-ples?’ Even in this case, researchers still have to choose the examples,but that is the only choice they have to make.

Particularly in the case of tests, researchers have to make a numberof more or less arbitrary choices according to the case. Additionally,their subjects have to work in situations which cannot adequately repli-cate a real life situation. Researchers are generally aware of this andfrequently apologise, but their results are no more reliable because ofthis recognition. In her research on the efficiency of dictionary examplesand definitions, Laufer admits:

But it should be remembered that the objectives of the experiment requiredan artificial situation of testing words out of context. In real life, people sel-dom learn words from monolingual dictionaries only. In the case of reading, aword is looked up in the dictionary and related to the text. … In the case ofwriting, people rarely use words which are entirely new to them. They do,however, look up words which are partially familiar to them. Therefore, in areal-life situation, it would be reasonable to expect better results than in theexperiment. (Laufer, 1993:138)

The debate on the use of experimental methods exceeds theboundaries of this book, but some clarification is required in order todispel doubts that may arise concerning the nature of my own research.A quote from Popper’s essay ‘The logic of social sciences’ corroboratesmy claim on the inadequacy of methods taken from the natural sciencesto elucidate lexicographic problems.

some point Malinowski wanted to find out what the Trobrianders’ concept of (fe-male) beauty was. So he started a conversation with some men and all of themagreed that they would never have sexual intercourse with one particular womanbecause of her physical unattractiveness. The Trobrianders had at that time noidea that sexual intercourse could lead to pregnancy. Malinowski was quite sur-prised to see that the woman in question had plenty of children. (Malinowski1929:246-247)

INTRODUCTION 21

There is, for instance, the misguided and erroneous methodological approachof naturalism or scientism, which urges that it is high time that the social sci-ences learn from the natural sciences what scientific method is. This mis-guided naturalism establishes such demands as: begin with observations andmeasurements; this means, for instance, begin by collecting statistical data;proceed, next, by induction to generalisations and to the formation of theo-ries. It is suggested that in this way you will approach the ideal of objectivity,so far as this is at all possible in the social sciences. In so doing, however, youought to be conscious of the fact that objectivity in the social sciences is muchmore difficult to achieve (if it can be achieved at all) than in the natural sci-ences. For being objective demands that one is not biased by one’s valuejudgements – that is (as Max Weber called it), ‘to be value-free.’ But only inthe rarest cases can the social scientist free himself from the value system ofhis own social class and so achieve even a limited degree of ‘value freedom’and ‘objectivity.’ (Popper, 1994:67-68)

It is true that a comparison with the social sciences to which Popperrefers is relative. The need to free themselves from a value systemseems an irrelevant requirement for linguists, but there are existentialaspects in the researcher’s situation that can be assimilated to this ‘valuesystem.’ For example, since English is the language most research fo-cuses on, frequently Anglo-Saxon researchers investigate their ownmother tongue, leading them to formulate what I sometimes think arewrong research questions. Also, not enough researchers seem to haveexperience with teaching a foreign language —which is different from‘teaching one’s own language to foreigners’— and this leads to a falseperception of where the possible difficulties for learners lay. Conse-quently, many researchers do not have much experience with using adictionary for other than research purposes. Finally, some researchershave close ties with publishing companies, which must make some con-clusions more ‘desirable’ than others. All these factors can lead to bi-ased research results, despite the most scientific research methods andthe best intentions. When scientific methods borrowed from the naturalsciences are applied to issues like dictionaries one does extract informa-tion from them, but they usually shed more light on what researcher andsubjects want us to think they do than what they really do.

In tests as well as in questionnaires there is the possibility of inter-fering in the execution of scientific methods without acknowledging thisinterference. Lexicographers have opinions and these end up interferingin the design of any of the controlled experiments of which I am aware.


The danger of the researcher influencing the results exist in the case ofqualitative research as well, but in this case the research is presentedfrom the onset as the result of introspection and personal assessment.

The way dictionary research has been dealt with over the last 20years gives the impression that the field is, to borrow a concept preciselyfrom the natural sciences, seeking out a new ‘paradigm’ (Kuhn, 1970).In the case of lexicography, the old paradigm is evident through re-search questions such as ‘is grammar necessary in a dictionary?’ ‘how toclassify multi-word items,’ ‘the inclusion of specialist vocabulary?’ ‘dic-tionary skills,’ ‘translation equivalents in bilingual dictionaries.’ Thesewere the questions considered to be ‘relevant.’ This paradigm is nowbeing questioned as is illustrated by the fact that in the literature of thelast 20 years articles on relatively minor topics, such as those above, areon an equal footing with articles on more fundamental questions such asuser needs. This is reminiscent of a paragraph in The Structure of Scien-tific Revolutions:

When scientists disagree about whether the fundamental problems of theirfield have been solved, the search for rules gains a function that it does notordinarily possess. While paradigms remain secure, however, they can func-tion without agreement over rationalisation or without any attempted rationali-sations at all. (Kuhn, 1970:49)

‘Rules’ are the methodology which current lexicographic literatureseems to have lost. The current attempts to define ‘needs’ are a symp-tom of a much-needed ‘rationalisation’ of the area. Dictionaries todayare the result of material conditions and ideological considerations,some of which have disappeared or become irrelevant. Indeed, a num-ber of dictionary features such as codes, abbreviations, the non-separation of encoding and decoding, are the result of the use of paperand consequent commercial considerations are no longer inevitable. Thesame thing applies to alphabetic ordering, so characteristic of traditionallexicography, and which has given rise to research topics such as ‘underwhat entries do learners look up the meaning of idioms.’ In a computerprogramme all items of a dictionary are randomly accessible and pro-grams (such as Euroglot and others) have solved this problem in astraightforward and simple way.

Nonetheless, articles are still being published on the problem oflemmatisation, which, in my opinion, belongs to the past. Furthermore,

INTRODUCTION 23

combining the solution of space and ordering, computers have nowmade it commercially feasible to realise an old lexicographic dream:split up encoding and decoding.

Ideology

I have already mentioned the ideological element in lexicography. Amethodology which aims at delineating the needs of dictionary user’sshould attempt to disperse a bit of the ideological fog2 which surroundsdictionaries and is responsible for part of their content. I see the influ-ence of ideology in two ways.

Firstly, by standardising the language, dictionaries helped to con-solidate modern national consciousness. Dictionaries became an elementof identification with a national creed, and this affirmation of nationalconsciousness has often been their main ‘raison d’être.’ There is indeedno need to explain the meaning of a word to an audience, which knowsperfectly well what they mean. Because learner’s dictionaries were de-rived from native speaker’s dictionaries, this ideological factor affectedforeign language lexicography, which is why so much in a learner’s dic-tionary, seems ill adapted to its audience and their needs. Not an analy-sis of the needs was the starting point, but a pre-existing kind of book.

Secondly, dictionaries are not only tools. They are also objects,which hold a place and function in the ‘système des objets’ (Baudrillard,1968, 1970, 1972). Dictionaries are social objects, emblems of liter-acy, guardians of culture, warrants of distinction. As such, they alsohave to respond to particular criteria, which have little to do with theirdeclared purpose. Instead of having only a usage value, dictionaries alsohave a significant symbolic value, and are not only the mere answer to amere need. As Baudrillard puts it:

2 The concept of ideology is a rather controversial one, and is used by a number of

philosophical and sociological schools. I will not attempt to go into unnecessarydetail here. I hold a fairly Marxist view of ideology in the sense of a system ofideas, which justifies the position of a particular class within society. This system ofideas may give a more or less correct vision of society, but it might just as well not.In the case of a dictionary, an item intimately linked with the shaping of the mod-ern state, it is difficult to ignore any political motivation in its design beyond theone that is publicly admitted.


Aujourd’hui la consommation – si ce terme a un sens autre que celui que luidonne l’économie vulgaire – définit précisément ce stade où la marchandiseest immédiatement produite comme signe, comme valeur/signe, et les signes (laculture) comme marchandise. (Baudrillard, 1972:178, author’s emphasis)

The reasons for the compilation of a native speaker’s dictionary arelargely symbolic. They are produced as a ‘signe,’ as a cultural value.Similarly, in the case of learner's dictionaries, the psychological valueshould not be underestimated. Learners are attracted to monolingualdictionaries because it is seen as an ‘upgrade,’ a sign that they havereached a near native status. It does not necessarily mean that it is thebest dictionary for their purposes.

One of the symbolic functions of dictionaries is to defend the lan-guage against ‘corruption.’ The compilers of the Dictionnaire del’Académie française were convinced that the French language had at-tained in their century the highest degree of perfection. “Il (leDictionnaire de l'Académie) a esté commencé & achevé dans le siecle leplus florissant de la Langue Françoise…” (Introduction, no page num-ber, electronic version.)

In parallel, Johnson writes in his Plan of an English Dictionary(1747): “The chief intent of it is to preserve the purity, and ascertainthe meaning of our English idiom…” (No page number, electronic edi-tion)

However legitimate, from the moment the preservation of the ‘pu-rity’ of the language became the dictionaries’ main function, they ceasedbeing tools and became repositories.

Learner’s dictionaries preserve many of their model’s characteris-tics and instead of adjusting to needs, they have inherited part of thenative speaker’s dictionaries’ function as symbols. To quote an example,the only reason why spanner is defined in a learner’s dictionary such asthe Cambridge International Dictionary of English —‘a metal tool with ashaped end, used to turn nuts and bolts,’— has no other justification, noother raison d’être than its mere presence in the dictionary. It has to bethere because this book can only be called a dictionary if it includes thisword. It will not teach foreigners what a spanner is. It might even inducethem into thinking that it is a nutcracker.

I am not claiming that dictionaries should shed their ideological

INTRODUCTION 25

function, since ideologies do have a reason to exist. However, with re-gards to the part of these tools that is dedicated to solving linguisticproblems, ideology only stands in the way. An identification of the‘bare’ facts of the problem with a humane minimum of ideological bi-ases is essential for research to be productive. As it is, the strength ofthe dictionary’s symbolic value is one of the elements which has pre-vented researchers from approaching the question in a more funda-mental way.

New criteria

The task of defining new criteria appears to be a huge one. Remarkably,publishers are now the ones launching new trends, which are then ex-amined by the researchers. There are perhaps at present more elec-tronic dictionaries on the market than research articles published on thesubject3. At the least a sound analysis of the learners’ needs and a con-sequent reshuffling of the different components of existing dictionariesshould be carried out. Over the centuries, lexicographers have produceda large amount of fine work and a mere reorganisation of this materialwould already be a huge step forward.

The techniques borrowed from the natural sciences have proven in-sufficient4 for a tabula rasa. Until now, a qualitative approach hashardly been attempted. Of course every researcher dreads the accusa-tion of being subjective. But the objective veneer on tests and question-naires is thin. I find it preferable for researchers with experience in thematter to question their own practices. In the words of Rousseau: ‘Laréflexion jointe à l’usage donne des idées nettes…’

I propose to submit dictionaries to an ‘analyse de textes’ which isindeed more typical of literary studies and bears some relationship tostructural methods as applied by Barthes (1957) and Baudrillard (1968,

3 Even recent articles on the subject remain remarkably superficial because there is

still very little fundamental research on the subject to fall back on. (Leech andNesi, 1999) Nesi (1999) undoubtedly knowing her (lexicographic) audience, stillfeels rightfully compelled to ‘introduce’ the electronic dictionary.

4 This is, again, illustrated by what occurs in the area of second language acquisition.As Krashen (1996) shows in his account of a very proficient language learner,more can be learned from the experience of successful individuals than from so-called scientific tests.


1970). On one hand, I look for the implicit criteria which guidelexicographic practice, as will be seen in my analysis of dictionaryexamples (in Chapter 3). On the other, I analyse the look-up process asan expression of the user’s needs. To do this, I draw on my experienceas a routine dictionary user and, why not admit it, the use I made ofdictionaries to write this book. Indeed, in the course of this research Ihad the feeling that I benefited most of all from my own consulting ofdictionaries and from monitoring myself. As Descartes put it: “non pasqu’il ne puisse y avoir au monde plusieurs esprits incomparablementmeilleurs que le mien; mais pource qu’on ne saurait si bien concevoirune chose et la rendre sienne, lorsqu’on l’apprend de quelque autre,que lorsqu’on l’invente soi-même.”

A last hedge regards the form in which this book was written, whichsome may object to be somewhat episodic. This may be because thebulk of this research consists of an observation of the facts and not ofwhat has been written on them.

It is surely easier to weave a perfect web when one remains distantfrom the facts, and it is easier to write a philosophy of dictionaries thanto attempt to improve them. In this book I have examined all publica-tions which were within my reach. But the examination of these con-vinced me that the confrontation with the different aspects of the prob-lem would inevitably produce a less homogeneous picture than if I hadworked on secondary sources.

What is qualitative lexicographic research?

The issue can be approached through two different points of view. Thefirst one is to look at what has been produced and ask oneself: whatpurpose does this production serve? For instance, taking the entry formidget in the Oxford Wordpower, one can ask what is the purpose of‘/’mIdZIt/noun [countable] a very small person.’ The pronunciation isincluded for speaking purposes; the grammatical information is in-cluded for speaking or writing purposes; and the definition is includedfor reading or listening purposes. One can then go a step further andsee if the information directed at the speaking audience is sufficient andadequate and do the same for the information intended for the listening,writing and reading audiences. In this particular case, one can claimthat there is too much information for anyone who only wanted to pro-

INTRODUCTION 27

nounce the word. The pronunciation, in turn, is useless to the writinguser and the space could have been filled with an example. Doing thiskind of exercise one slowly becomes aware of dictionaries’ shortcom-ings.

Another kind of qualitative approach starts not from the product,but from its intended user. This kind of approach implies analysing thebehaviour of specific dictionary users: the researcher her/himself, or athird person. I did this with myself for a few years. I may have deceivedmyself more than once. I hope I have not deceived myself the wholetime.


DICTIONARIES, HISTORY AND LEARNERS’ NEEDS 29

CHAPTER 1

DICTIONARIES, HISTORY AND LEARNERS’ NEEDS

1. THE HISTORY OF DICTIONARIES

Until recently “user needs” were not a lexicographic issue. Dictionarieswere tools created to respond to some obvious needs of a particularaudience, such as communicate with people who spoke a different lan-guage. The first dictionaries were bilingual. They registered Sumerianwords and their Eblaite translations. Its purpose was clear: to make pos-sible at least a rudimentary communication between two people whospoke different languages.

In the first century AD, some nine hundred years after the Iliadand the Odyssey were written, the Greeks found it increasingly difficultto understand the versified account of their mythical ancestors’ eventfultravels, and scholars had the idea to compile commentaries on the hardwords in Homer. These were the first monolingual dictionaries. Thistime the purpose was to make possible a diachronic form of communi-cation. Hard words were intralingually translated from old Greek intoModern Greek. In the Middle Ages this practice of explaining hardwords was expanded and the wordlists became independent of thebooks they were found in.

In 1447, an Italian-German word list was compiled for travelling


purposes, which is considered the oldest ‘modern’ bilingual dictionary.By the end of the fifteenth century, dictionaries had become a relativelycommon tool, according to Hale:

From the 1480s, travellers had begun to include glossaries of useful foreignwords as appendices to their narratives. Polyglot vocabularies were publishedwith increasing frequency from 1477; François Garon’s Vocabulary of fivelanguages: Latin, Italian, French, Spanish and German proved so popular af-ter its publication in Venice in 1526 that by the 1546 edition it had been ex-tended to cover eight languages. Jacopo Strada, a scholarly collector anddealer in antiquities whose portrait was painted by Titian, dies in 1588 whileworking on an eleven-language dictionary. From the early sixteenth century,multi-lingual conversation and phrase books started to appear as simple aidsfor merchants abroad; from the mid-century they broadened to satisfy thosewho wished to learn a foreign language in some depth. (Hale: 1994, 159)

During the revival of classical Latin in the Renaissance, a wholerange of Latin, Greek and Hebraic bilingual dictionaries went to press.They responded primarily to a need for decoding classical and biblicaltexts. In addition, these dictionaries assisted students eager to studyclassical Latin. Because of this return to the roots and general rise incivilization level in Europe, languages expanded their vocabulariesthrough the borrowing of words, mainly from Latin and Greek. Aston-ishing is the fact that words like involve, exactly, activity, education, sin-cerity and society, to name but a few, were coined single-handedly byThomas Elyot (Green, 1996: 87). The new words had to be explainedto the ‘more-knowing women, and the less-knowing men’ (Osselton,1983) which gave rise to new monolingual dictionaries.

The real turning point in lexicography came in 1612, when theFlorentine Accademia della Crusca published a comprehensive list of allthe words that its members, the crusconi, considered to be authenticallyItalian. This was the Italian they themselves spoke, of course, and‘wrong’ was whatever others spoke. What they were interested in wasthe ‘toscanizzazione.’ The Crusca Vocabolario is generally regarded tobe the first modern monolingual dictionary since it sought comprehen-sive coverage for its own sake. This is, to my knowledge, the first timethe purpose of a dictionary became unclear. In the words of the present-day crusconi:


... opera concepita come uno strumento dedicato ai letterati e fondata sullalingua fiorentina fattasi "classica" per il tramite delle opere dei grandi autoridel Trecento, Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, e assurta a lingua letteraria degliscrittori non toscani, desiderosi di abbandonare, nei generi più elevati, il lorodialetto per una lingua d'arte comune. 5

The Vocabolario is, in its original sense, a thesaurus6. It collectedwords as for a treasure, and illustrates the capacity of the language torepresent nationhood. Its purpose was to draw a political andsociological line, which had little to do with the primitive function of thedictionary as an aide to communication. As Collison puts it:

The spirit of nationalism has often proved a driving force in the making ofdictionaries. Scholars were quick to recognize that the compilation of a reli-able and comprehensive dictionary was one sign of the achievement of theircountry’s maturity, just as the lack of grammars and dictionaries indicated thedominance of a foreign power or the weakness of a truly national feeling.(Collison, 1982,18)

The crusconi seemingly had no problem in admitting this. Quitesensibly they assumed there was no point in explaining to an Italianaudience what a dog was, and they simply defined cane as ‘known ani-mal’ (Lepschy, 1984:174). The intention of the members of the Acca-demia was to exalt the Florentine language, not to explain it.

The Crusca dictionary represents a remarkable shift in the purposeof dictionaries. Whereas formerly their aim was to assist communication,intralingually or interlingually, synchronically or diachronically, fromthen on only bilingual dictionaries could claim to have this exclusivepurpose. In addition, from La Crusca onwards dictionaries start to em-body literacy and culture, just as the possession of a Bible meant untilrecently adherence to Christianity. Hence, the purpose of dictionarieschanged from practical to symbolic, from functional to emblematic.Monolingual dictionaries have become ‘treasures,’ intended primarily tobe owned and not to be used, and they include as much information onwords as can be gathered about them —meaning, etymology, grammar, 5 At the Accademia della Crusca Site: http:// www.csovi.fi.cnr.it/crusca6 If we look at the titles, this trend had begun early: Trésor de la langue française

(Nicot, 1530-1600), Tesoro de la lengua castellana (Covarrubias, 1611). TheDutch and German words for vocabulary –woordenschat and Wortschatz– reflectthis, as well as the Latin word commonly used for dictionaries: thesaurus.


synonyms, antonyms—, regardless of the usefulness of such informationor what audience this information has to serve.

***

In 1610, Covarrubias published his Tesoro de la lengua castellana. TheTesoro is still much of a hard words dictionary, complemented by theprivate intellectual pursuits of a brilliant, learned mind. The non-normative, almost casual manner in which the dictionary was writtenmay well be related to the fact that language was not at that time a po-litical issue in Spain. Due to the nature of the Reconquista, Spain has nodialects until this day and Catalan and Basque nationalism are a 19th

century phenomenon.

This was not the case of France, struggling at the time to hold itsvarious pieces together. Spain was unified at the end of the 15th century.France would define its present day borders only under Louis XIV. In1634, Cardinal Richelieu founded the Académie Française with the ob-jective of compiling a French national dictionary, eventually to be pub-lished in 1694. Known for his shrewdness as well as for his interests inthe arts, Richelieu’s intentions were first political. The centralisation ofpower and the construction of a sense of nationality demanded a unifiedlanguage. Reaching a cultural apex around mid-17th century, the mo-ment seemed ripe to stabilise and unify the French language under onecentralising power, just as the state was being centralised politically.

Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755.Although Johnson’s dictionary was a private undertaking, it had a simi-lar goal as its French and Italian predecessors: standardising. To stan-dardise means to unify. Johnson wanted to protect the English languagefrom ‘corruption.’ In Germany, the project of the Grimm brothers’ dic-tionary was intimately linked with the linguistic unification of a highlydialectal Germany, at that time attempting to reach its political unifica-tion.

As a result, the primary function of a monolingual dictionary be-came blurred. Why does one have a monolingual dictionary? For exam-ple, I have been living in Brazil for almost 20 years. I have a copy of theDutch Van Dale and the French Robert, which I consider my two mothertongues. I have never used them once. Colleagues at the university tellme they use their Aurélio frequently, but they are unable to tell me what


they look up. “When they are planning to write an article, to see what aword exactly means,” one sometimes hears. They use their mothertongue’s dictionary like a philosophy handbook. However, dictionariesare written by people who have certainly less philosophical qualificationsthen university lecturers.

Surveys report that meaning is the first reason why people reach fora monolingual dictionary of their mother tongue, and spelling is the sec-ond reason. However, once again these results are based merely on therespondents’ opinions. According to my own observation, the main rea-son why native speakers look up words in a dictionary is spelling, fol-lowed by meaning only, of course, in the case of infrequent words.Some might find the apparently modest use people make of such volu-minous volumes hard to admit since it implies that a considerable pieceof work and scholarship can be replaced by a simple list of words. Yet,if one recalls that Wittgenstein compiled such a list there should be nodishonour in admitting this.

Monolingual dictionaries are primarily symbols, secondarily and atbest serving an intralingual translation purpose. This is certainly not thecase of bilingual dictionaries, which involve little symbolism and have aclear objective. The line between these two kinds of dictionaries becameblurred, however, from the moment people like Hornby started usingmonolingual dictionaries in foreign language teaching, with a new kindof dictionary as a result. Indeed, in 1947 Hornby published The Ad-vanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English. The learner's dictionarytried to give back to the monolingual dictionary a function which it hadat that point only kept in name: explain words. Nevertheless, the designof the monolingual dictionary was not adapted to this task and learner'sdictionaries were to inherit the ballast of their models. If learner's dic-tionaries had started from scratch by analysing the needs of the targetaudience, their features would be entirely different today.

2. LEARNER’S DICTIONARIES

At the end of the nineteenth century, the focus of language teachingstarted changing slowly from merely understanding to producing a for-eign language. However, it was the Second World War which gave thistendency a decisive impetus, resulting in dramatic changes in language


teaching and learning pedagogy in the sixties (Rivers, 1975). Theeighties’ ‘communicative approach’ made it clear that the emphasis wasnow on production. Compared to normal monolingual dictionaries, thelanguage used by the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary was simplerthan that of traditional monolingual dictionaries, the number of entriesand senses was smaller, and there were more examples. Hornby’s dic-tionary remained, however, a monolingual dictionary whose generalform and content was derived from the monolingual dictionaries for anative speaker audience. The task was less difficult than starting a com-pletely new bilingual dictionary from scratch. Hornby had worked for12 years in Japan and it is likely that he had a Japanese audience inmind. The first thing one would think of to help one’s students would bea bilingual dictionary. It is my experience that a great many foreign lan-guage teachers think that monolingual dictionaries are necessarily morecomplete than bilingual ones. This is generally true only because themain task of monolingual dictionaries is to be exactly that: complete, notbecause they are necessarily better7.

Apparently, Hornby had the courage and the knowledge to compilea dictionary, but not the necessary foreign language skills. As we learnthrough Cowie: “unlike Palmer and Gatenby (…) both of whom spokeJapanese to a high standard and showed a deep and informed interest inthe local culture, Hornby made no serious attempt to learn the lan-guage.” (Cowie, 1999:9) Yet, his intention was most likely to help hisstudents with whatever means he had available. And he did invent anew concept of dictionary. Learner’s dictionaries are like universal ‘bi-lingual’ dictionaries, since they translate hard English into easy English,independently of the user’s first language. However, it remains possiblethat the design of the first learner's dictionary was a result of its inven-tor’s ignorance of its audience’s mother tongue rather than of an analy-sis of their needs. The traditional monolingual dictionary was trans-formed to be acceptable to users less familiarised with the language thannative speakers are. It bears indeed many resemblances to children’sdictionaries. It therefore does not surprise me that the authors oflearner's dictionaries were themselves surprised that by 1981 the ad-

7 It seems appropriate here to mention Oxford’s Bilingual Spanish Dictionary, in

many aspects more comprehensive than some of its numerous prestigious Spanishmonolingual counterparts.


vantages of the learner's dictionary were not yet entirely clear to themain target audience. Cowie, in ‘Lexicography and its pedagogic appli-cations,’ illustrates the attitude towards learner’s dictionaries:

Yet, until quite recently there was no correspondingly widespread under-standing among teachers that the scale and character of the information pro-vided in a general EFL dictionary was radically different from that to befound in works intended for the native user. In particular, it was not generallyunderstood that the learner’s dictionary was designed to help with productionas much as interpretation. (Cowie, 1981:203)

I know from my own college experience that learner's dictionarieswere simply the kind of monolingual dictionary you would find abroad.In 2001, I am sure, most owners of learner’s dictionaries, includingteachers, will still be hard-pushed to say what the difference is betweenthis kind of dictionary and a normal monolingual dictionary. From a de-coding point of view, learner's dictionaries presuppose a sufficientlygood command of the language to understand the definition. If learnersdo not understand words such as cat and dog, it is useless for them tolook them up in a learner’s dictionary. One of the easiest learner’s dic-tionaries, the Oxford Wordpower, defines cat as “a small furry animalwith four legs and a tail. People often keep cats as pets.” On the onehand, learners do not look up easy words because they know them fromother sources. Dogs and cats keep on wandering through the pages oflearner's dictionaries because these dictionaries inherited them fromnative speakers dictionaries designed for ideological purposes. As forthe hard words, learners do not understand the words used to explainthem. In addition and still from a decoding point of view, the reducednumber of entries and senses in learner’s dictionaries represents adrawback. It are precisely the least frequent words that cause mosttrouble to non-native readers.

Looking at learner’s dictionaries from an encoding point of view,they too have weaknesses. First, one has to know what to look up. Thismeans that in most cases learners will have to consult a bilingual dic-tionary prior to the learner’s dictionary. The learner’s dictionary is thenused to double-check what was found in the bilingual dictionary. How-ever, anyone with a sufficiently good enough command of English tounderstand a definition will be primarily interested in usage information,i.e. syntax and collocations. This means that examples, which transmit


this kind of information, are extremely important. Learner's dictionariesstill have few of them, except maybe the first edition of Cobuild on CD-ROM. Furthermore, the order of the information within the entries isgenerally based on the division in senses and not on usage. This makesthe search cumbersome, and the results doubtful. Moreover, since itappears that, paradoxically, learner’s dictionaries place no priority onsyntax or collocates information they are not the ideal tools for encodingor decoding.

3. BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES

So far, bilingual dictionaries do not appear to be flexible enough to meetthe current encoding needs. There is surprisingly little difference be-tween present-day and 17th century bilingual dictionaries. It is true that17th century dictionaries were astonishingly good, and until recentlythere was not much reason for change. As long as decoding was themain concern, traditional bilingual dictionaries were perfectly up to thetask.

One expects bilingual dictionaries to be used not only as decodingbut also as encoding tools. However, their target audience is hybrid as itis composed of native speakers of two different languages. The idea be-hind this is that the decoding information of one audience is the encod-ing information of the other. This does not always work out, since themain encoding aids –examples– are still rare, useless to one audience,and too scarce for the other. Moreover, fixed expressions, which are notstrictly speaking ‘examples,’ take up most of the examples’ space.

Bilingual dictionaries are most frequently produced by ‘mono-national’ publishers and they give tacit preference to the national audi-ence. Hence, the customary lack of balance between the two halves ofthis kind of dictionary in mere number of pages. It has to be mentionedthat recent joint ventures, such as the Oxford-Hachette, Oxford-Dudenor Collins-Robert, have done much to change this situation for the bet-ter.

However, there is still room for improvement. An encoder needs avery large amount of information in order to feel rightfully secure. If onecompiles a French-English dictionary supposed to be equally useful toEnglish and French users, the ideal amount of information is immense.


The Oxford-Hachette and Collins-Robert are admirable achievements,but they are cumbersome to use and yet still incomplete.

4. BILINGUALISED DICTIONARIES

A relatively recent phenomenon in foreign language lexicography is thebilingualised dictionary. As a mix between a bilingual and a learner’sdictionary, a bilingualised dictionary defines words in the same manneras a learner’s dictionary, and completes this definition with a translation.Sometimes only the definition text is translated. This technique has theapparent advantage of settling the question of whether it is better to givelearners a definition or a translation. Indeed, for learners who read thewhole entry, one could say this formula is an improvement. Bilin-gualised dictionaries presently exist only in versions with a reducednumber of headwords. The constantly reprinted Longman English Dic-tionary for Portuguese Speakers is a good example of this kind of diction-ary. Thanks to a simple Portuguese wordlist at the end, this kind of bi-lingualised dictionary comes close to an ideal encoding tool for begin-ners. It is surprising that other learner’s dictionaries have so far ne-glected this simple and useful device. The fact that it would imply writ-ing a different dictionary for every single language is probably the rea-son why this has not been done yet.

Despite all the praise they deserve, bilingualised dictionaries alsosuffer the restrictions I articulated for bilingual and learner’s dictionar-ies. For the purposes of decoding, these dictionaries do not have enoughentries and are only helpful in the case of relatively easy texts. For mosthard words, learners still have to consult another dictionary. A diction-ary is a tool, however, and the main activity of learners is not ‘lookingup words in a dictionary.’ They look up words because they are reading,writing, or listening. Therefore it is likely that even in dictionaries thatprovide a translation alongside a definition, users will turn immediatelyto the translation and not waste time reading both. This translation mightnot give an exact idea of what the word means, but since the difficultword was found in a context – the text which the learner is reading – ,this will help the learner make the necessary adjustments.

Seen from the angle of encoding, the criticisms that apply tolearner’s dictionaries apply to bilingualised dictionaries as well. The en-


coder still has to know which word to look up, a problem these diction-aries do not resolve unless they have a list at the end. However, itshould not surprise us that in a test conducted by Batia Laufer (1994),subjects equipped with a bilingualised dictionary scored better than oth-ers who had only a bilingual or a monolingual dictionary at their dis-posal. Since these dictionaries are often learner’s dictionaries with atranslation added, the result was of course a net increase in information.

A somewhat different kind of bilingualised dictionary is the CobuildEnglish-Portuguese Bridge Bilingual conceived by John Sinclair. Co-build’s Student’s Dictionary definitions were translated into Portuguese,maintaining the entry words in English. Here is an example:

begrudge, se você begrudge someone algo, você sente que essa pessoanão merece isso e sente inveja dela por tê-lo.

As the name Bridge suggests, the authors intended to compile adictionary that made a bridge between a bilingual English-Portuguesedictionary and an English learner’s dictionary. The information is iden-tical to that found in the Cobuild Student’s Dictionary, but translatedinto Portuguese. Probably the purpose was to show the syntactic con-straints of the word in the L2, but it is doubtful whether this is effective(Humblé, 1996).

5. THE LONGMAN LANGUAGE ACTIVATOR

From a strictly encoding point of view, the most successful lexicographicundertaking of the last few years is the Longman Language Activator. Inthis case, the authors started from scratch in trying to match a productto the needs of the user. The result is a considerable leap forward. Theknowledge in the L2 that users are supposed to have before using theActivator is the superordinate of the word they are looking for. Fromthere on, the dictionary leads the learner to an alternative item that ex-presses their thought more adequately (e.g. find overdo by looking forexaggerate).

A criticism one can make of the Activator is that, in spite of its1600 pages, its innovations and its size are, overall, modest. There arenot enough examples and, since only the most frequent superordinateswere included, there might be too few entries for advanced learners.


Even so, the Activator is a large volume and the fact that it was printedon paper must have limited the inclusion of more entries and examples.One can only regret that in a time when paper dictionaries are being puton CD-ROM as frequently as they are, Longman printed a dictionarythat has all the characteristics of an electronic dictionary.

***

At the beginning of their history, dictionaries were compiled with a pre-cise purpose in mind: to make possible communication in the same orbetween two different languages. With the advent of modern states,monolingual dictionaries began to assume a symbolic function. Throughlearner’s dictionaries, a part of foreign language lexicography also par-ticipates in this symbolic function, and this confuses the relationshipbetween the dictionary and the user.

Nowadays the needs of foreign language learners are changing andforeign language lexicography is seeking ways to adapt. Learners aredemanding efficient encoding tools, since this requires more informationthan decoding. Technology offers a solution to lexicography’s oldestproblem: space. The question lexicographers are now faced with is howto combine needs and the technological means to meet them. In spite ofits obvious benefits, lexicography has as yet made little use of computertechnology, because no one has a precise idea of what has to be done.Solving this question implies researching the kind of dictionary learnersneed for encoding. Once it is accepted that decoding and encoding haveto be separated, the problem is reduced to knowing what an ideal encod-ing dictionary is. However, even though improvements can always besuggested, a number of bilingual and monolingual dictionaries are al-ready perfect decoding tools.

To know what an encoding dictionary should be like, one has to be-come aware of the sequence that learners have followed when they suc-ceed in using a new word correctly. A possible starting point is the L1,but it could be a close word in the L2. Alternatively, they may start fromthe right L2 word and want more information on its usage. To succeedin mapping the learner’s look-up sequence means deciphering thestructure of the ideal dictionary. As will become clear in my review ofthe literature on the subject, over the last few years much research hasconcentrated on discovering the answer to the question: What do learn-


ers do when they consult a dictionary and what helps them best? Oncethis question is answered, a new kind of dictionary can be designed.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE 41

CHAPTER 2

REVIEW OF LITTERATURE

1. DICTIONARY USE AND USERS – QUESTIONNAIRESAND EXPERIMENTS

In what follows I review some examples of research carried out mainlyby Tomaszczyk, Atkins, Nesi, Laufer and Béjoint on dictionaries andtheir users. Next, I will discuss Sue Atkins’s article (1996) ‘Bilingualdictionaries: past, present and future’ to examine the potential of newtechnologies for foreign language lexicography. A full critical account ofthe literature on the subject can be found in Dolezal (1999).

Over the past 20 years, a relatively great number of articles havebeen published on the subject of dictionary use, and interest in thesubject is growing. Moreover, as encoding becomes increasinglyimportant, so does the need to reconsider the way in which dictionariesare compiled. So far, in order to discover the needs of the targetaudience, researchers have used mainly two techniques: questionnairesand tests. The former ask users what they use their dictionaries for,while the latter test users and dictionaries via controlled experiments.


1. Questionnaires

Questionnaires ask users questions of the kind: do learners use a mono-lingual or a bilingual dictionary; do they use it for reading or writing; dothey use it to look up meaning, spelling, etymology or grammar. Thesubjects are typically ESL students.

The first comprehensive questionnaire on dictionary use waselaborated by Tomaszczyk (1979). He questioned foreign students atAmerican and Polish colleges, and foreign language students at a Polishuniversity. His main conclusion was that students preferred bilingual tomonolingual dictionaries, and that meaning and spelling were the mainreasons for using a dictionary.

In 1981, Béjoint conducted a more detailed survey, yet less com-prehensive in terms of subjects. Béjoint tried to discover how Frenchstudents of English used their monolingual English dictionaries. Heasked 122 subjects 20 questions ranging from ‘Do you own a monolin-gual English dictionary?’ to ‘Which types of information do you lookup?’ According to this survey, half of the students used their monolin-gual English dictionary once a week, mainly to look up meaning. Half ofthe students said they sometimes browsed through their dictionary with-out a special purpose, 89% admitted they had read the introduction totheir dictionaries ‘less than thoroughly.’ More than half responded thatthey never used the dictionary codes, while 70% affirmed they used ex-amples and quotations, 68% used the synonyms, and 24% used thepictures. Some 50 % of the students thought their dictionaries were toosimplified while 45% thought they were just right. 77% claimed satis-faction.

Béjoint devotes the introduction to his report to a succinct but keenanalysis of the needs of the foreign language learner. He stresses the dif-ference between encoding and decoding and sums up the matter: ‘thebest dictionary for decoding is the one that contains the largest numberof entries’ and ‘the best dictionary for encoding is one that provides themost detailed guidance on syntax and collocation’ (1982:210). One in-evitably has to conclude that Béjoint knows obviously more about dic-tionary use than his subjects, and his thoughts on the topic exceed byfar the results of his survey.

Béjoint’s questionnaire was pioneering, but when looked at from a


distance of more than 20 years, one is astonished that the questionsmake little use of the decoding/encoding distinction when the author’sanalysis shows a clear awareness of how this affects dictionary use. Thequestion ‘Which types of information do you look for most often in yourdictionary?’ is difficult to answer, or the answer is difficult to interpret, ifone does not know the purpose of the look-up. Furthermore, when thesurvey indicates that 87% of the interrogated subjects claim they lookfor meaning, 53% for syntactic information, 52% for synonyms, 25%for spelling and pronunciation, and 5% for etymology, it is likely thatstudents look for meaning when they decode and for syntactic informa-tion, synonyms and spelling when they encode.

2. Criticism of Questionnaires

Bogaards (1988) voices a number of criticisms on questionnaires. Hementions the need for a homogeneous subject sample, the lack of depthof some analyses and the scarcity of interesting answers due to thevagueness of the questions. Bogaards also laments that questions oftensuggest the answers. He does not fundamentally criticise the method,however, presenting in the same article the results of one of his ownquestionnaires.In 1987, Hartmann, himself the author of a questionnaire (1983), sumsup his criticism as follows:

Research into dictionary use still tends to be small-scale, often non-representative, non-comparable (even contradictory!), non-correlational, andnon-replicable. This partly explains the tentative nature of many of the find-ings, which frequently have the status of ‘informed opinion’ rather than validgeneralisation. (…) (tests) are more difficult to devise and possibly thereforerarer… Even more complex techniques like controlled experiments have notbeen used at all. (Hartmann, 1987:27)

In my view, questionnaires are to be used with caution for tworeasons. First, one assumes the subjects have a knowledge of linguisticconcepts and a lexicographic awareness which I think they generallylack. Do they know what an ‘idiom’ is? Do they really, as Béjoint claims,look for ‘syntactic information’ in more than half of the cases, or is thiswhat they think they do … or remember they did? Do they know what‘syntactic information’ is at all? Do 68% look up idioms ‘very often’ or


do they not remember when they looked up, e.g., synonyms butremember idioms as something special?

Second, the use of questionnaires assumes that subjects are beinghonest. In a simple questionnaire I personally devised some years ago, Irequired the subjects to write down the name of their dictionary withoutlooking at it. Surprisingly almost all of the subjects appeared to be ableto answer this question! Often a teacher administers the questionnaires,which increases the risk that subjects will take it as an exam, and answerwhat they think the teacher wants them to answer. Consequently, onecan understand Glynn Hatherall’s question: “Are subjects saying herewhat they do, or what they think they do, or what they think they oughtto do, or indeed a mixture of all three?” (Quoted by Hartmann1987:22)

In an overview, Battenburg (1991) lists 11 research projectscarried out between 1979 and 1990. Most of them consist exclusively ofquestionnaires but a few have a test element. All of these studies cometo similar conclusions. First, learners prefer bilingual to monolingualdictionaries. Second, they should be taught more dictionary skills.

Nuccorini’s research (1992) on dictionary use among students andteachers is an example of how difficult the issue of survey reliability is.Repeatedly she catches her subjects’ contradictions, concluding blandlythat teachers’ forms are much more reliable than students’ forms. Ifresearchers themselves have to pick out the “right” answers, then whatis the use of going through the trouble of devising a survey?

Questionnaires were the first indication of a changing relationshipbetween the lexicographers and their audience. Examined 20 yearslater, the results of these first questionnaires seem obvious, even if theywere not so at the time. It would not be surprising if more recentquestionnaires only confirmed the conclusions of the first ones. One cansafely assume that this research method has by now yielded all itspossible results. Questionnaires only investigate what is and not whatshould be or could be. The only practical conclusions to be drawn fromthem are what dictionary features learners use (and should bemaintained), and what features they do not use (and should beeliminated).

Since questionnaires depend heavily on what subjects consciouslyknow or think they know, it seems logical that controlled experiments, or


tests, would at some point take over.

3. Controlled Experiments

Bensoussan, Sim and Weiss (1984) carried out a pioneering experimenton dictionary use. It dealt with the impact of bilingual and monolingualdictionaries on reading comprehension through a multiple-choice EFLreading test. Surprisingly, they detected no noticeable difference be-tween the results of those students allowed to use a bilingual dictionaryand those working without any dictionary help.

In 1992, Batia Laufer tested the efficiency of corpus-based versuslexicographer examples in the comprehension and production of newwords. Results indicated that the innovative ‘authentic examples’ asused by Cobuild, did not improve learners’ performance.Lexicographers’ examples appeared to be more efficient. In 1993, thesame researcher investigated ‘The effect of dictionary definitions andexamples on the use and comprehension of new L2 words.’ She startedfrom findings in first language research that showed that:

… children below puberty define words by describing and using them in sen-tences, while the older ones (ages 10-14) tend to define words in abstract andgeneric terms… These findings would suggest that it is the definition ratherthan the example that is most beneficial to the average user of the monolin-gual dictionary, since such dictionaries are most often used by adolescentsand adults. (p.133)

In her test, Laufer asked 43 first-year Hebrew university studentsfor the translation of 18 words. Some had the help of a definition, someof an example, some of a definition in combination with an example.The results were that for decoding, combined entries worked best, butexamples on their own seemed to be worse than just a definition. Inaddition, “… the understanding of new words improves more when adefinition is added than when an example is added (…) in production,unlike in comprehension, an example alone will be just as efficient as adefinition alone.” (Laufer, 1994:139)

Finally, in a research project I previously mentioned, Laufer andMelamed (1994) compared the efficiency of monolingual, bilingual andbilingualised dictionaries. Two groups of EFL learners totalling 123subjects were tested on their decoding and encoding abilities, using 15low frequency words. Although there were differences depending on the


activity, the overall conclusion was that bilingualised dictionaries werethe most effective.

4. Atkins and Varantola

Atkins and Varantola (1997) illustrate lexicographers’ attempts to de-velop new measuring methods. Their aim was “to monitor the dictionarylook-up process in as natural a situation as possible (1997:2).” The re-searchers asked 103 people (71 in Oxford and 32 in Tampere) to carryout a translation task to and from their first language. For the 32 stu-dents in Tampere this language was Finnish. In Oxford, the studentswere of mixed linguistic origin, English being the first language for 38 ofthem. Working in pairs, one of the subjects would use a dictionary andthe other one would write down what the first one did. The result of theexperiment was a written account of no less than 1.000 dictionary look-ups.

The conclusions of the researchers were as follows: subjects preferbilingual to monolingual dictionaries; 90% of the look-ups are related toencoding tasks; advanced students use the dictionary more thanbeginners; in the case of translating into English as an L2, users firstlook up the word in a bilingual dictionary and afterwards in amonolingual one; finally, advanced learners were less easily satisfiedwith their dictionary than beginners.

In spite of the test’s comprehensiveness and large number ofsubjects, these results are not exactly surprising. Additionally, and asthe researchers themselves observe, one of the problems of this test wasthat the evaluation of the success rate of the look-ups was entirely left tothe discretion of the subjects. They themselves had to decide whethertheir use of the dictionary had given the expected results. It would havebeen interesting to know this in a more objective way. It would also havebeen interesting to know if the dictionaries had supplied the correctinformation, and if the users had been able to retrieve it.

Without this knowledge it becomes difficult to agree with statementslike: ‘The fact that in 59% of the cases the dictionary users pronouncedthemselves satisfied with the results of their search is encouraging’(p.24). Moreover, Atkins and Varantola claim that ‘the failure rate of40% (of the total number of look-ups) cannot be due only to someinadequacy on the part of the dictionaries involved: inadequate


strategies and unrealistic expectations on the part of the user must alsocontribute to this figure.’ (p.27) This gives the impression that theauthors were very committed to awarding dictionaries a 100%satisfaction rate.

Another flaw of Atkins and Varantola’s test is that, although theauthors admit that ‘the situation will change when new dictionaries arecompiled for electronic access only,’ they do not take this intoconsideration. When they respond to an alleged lack of information oncollocates they reply: ‘there is a physical limit to the amount ofinformation which a bilingual dictionary can contain.’(p.31) The truth isthat with present electronic storage capabilities, there is no limit, andeven if there were, collocations are such a vital piece of information thatit would be worthwhile to let other kinds of information out instead oflimiting the number of collocations. In reality, one knows thatcollocations are not widely present in great numbers in dictionariesbecause, first, there is no clear awareness of their importance forlearners and, second, they are extremely laborious to discover.

The main criticism one can make of this otherwise incrediblyinteresting piece of work is its nearly exclusive use of quantitative dataanalysis. The few qualitative analyses of specific look-ups are far moreappealing than the overall, massive, statistical conclusions.8 Theaccumulated material of Atkins and Varantola’s test should be a goldmine for anyone tackling user needs through qualitative researchmethods.

In conclusion, in the case of questionnaires, it is the learners, ratherthan the dictionaries, who are being evaluated. Atkins et al. leave nodoubt about this when they state: “The purpose of this research projectis to discover how effective a learner the student of English as a foreignlearner is when working with a bilingual and/or monolingual dictionary”(1987:29). Not surprisingly, questionnaires typically conclude thatlearners do not make proper use of the tools at their disposal.Accordingly, their authors frequently insist on the importance ofteaching ‘dictionary skills’ (Béjoint, 1981: passim; Nuccorini 1992, 8 On page 9, 10 and 11, the authors give an account of a number of look-ups that

could lead to exciting conclusions, and hints to improve the dictionaries used in theexperiment. However, they were probably considered too ‘small-scale’ to be worthyof much attention.


1994; Meara and Nesi: 1994). However, to recommend the teaching ofdictionary skills always sounds a little like trying to adapt the user to thewashing machine instead of the opposite. In many cases, users areundoubtedly unable to find the information in the dictionary when it isthere. In a great many cases, however, the information is not there orlays buried under loads of unwanted information. As Rundell puts it: “Amore realistic strategy is to aim for dictionaries whose structure is sotransparent that students do not need to learn how to use them, andwhose content is presented in such straightforward terms that users willhave no difficulty in grasping it.” (Rundell, (1999:48)

In the case of tests, unlike questionnaires, it is primarily thedictionary which is being evaluated. It is therefore interesting andencouraging that over the course of time emphasis has shifted fromquestionnaires to tests. Tests tend to blame the dictionaries for the badresults of the learners and question the dictionaries’ effectiveness. Onthe other hand, these same tests often conclude that lexicographicinnovations, or even dictionaries tout-court, make little or no difference(Bensoussan et al., 1984; Jain, 1981; Laufer, 1992, 1994; Nesi,1996). Additionally, authors of tests are also convinced that dictionaryusers are slightly naughty (Nuccorini, 1994), and apply the so-called‘kidrule strategy,‘ looking only at the first sense they come across(Meara and Nesi, 1994).

5. Hilary Nesi’s Research on Examples

I believe Hilary Nesi’s research on examples shows the limits of thenatural sciences method as applied to dictionary research while, at thesame time, pointing out a new way of tackling the problem. In 1996,Nesi (1996b) published an article in which she gave an account of anexperiment she carried out with forty EFL learners to discover to whatextent dictionary examples were helping them to produce sentencesfeaturing words previously unknown to them.

Two versions of the test were prepared, using entries taken from the secondversion of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE). In eachversion, example sentences and phrases for half the target words were re-moved. In version A examples for the first nine target words were removed,but examples for the last nine words were retained. In version B examples forthe first nine target words were retained, but for the last nine words were re-moved.’ (No page number, electronic version.)


The results of the test were surprising, not in the least for the re-searcher herself. Indeed,

No significant difference in appropriacy was found between language pro-duced with access to examples, and that produced without access to exam-ples. (…) These results are important because they seem to challenge lexicog-raphers’ beliefs regarding the value of examples. (Ibid.)

The fact is that these results challenge the beliefs of anyone whoever studied a foreign language, and invite us to have a critical look atthe method used in this experiment. At several stages of her research,Nesi had to make choices, involving opinions and a particular under-standing of the facts. The first choice concerned the subjects. Was itpossible to know what their knowledge was and if the sample was homo-geneous? Although a specific test was carried out to have an idea of thelearners’ background in terms of previous vocabulary knowledge, thisknowledge is only measurable in terms of number of words, and not interms of the more general awareness that supports the lexical knowl-edge. Surely, to know what ‘shot’ means is a different kind of knowledgefor a medical student than for a drug addict or a police man. Further-more, it is difficult to know what a particular dictionary example meansfor each of the test students in particular. Let us take the sentence se-lected in the LDOCE to illustrate perpetrate: ‘It was the managing direc-tor who perpetrated that frightful statue in the reception area.’ (The re-searcher herself has doubts on the appropriacy of this example.) West-ern learners of a certain age and experience will have no difficulty inidentifying the irony in this example and it may even have some use forthem. For other learners, however, this example is meaningless. This isan extreme case, but it is difficult to say what happened with any of thetest examples in the heads of the subjects. Consequently, it is difficult tosay what was the impact on their learning.

Secondly, another choice which Nesi had to make was the selectionof the words the subjects would be asked to use in their sentences. Iteventually became: enlighten, err, gravity, incorporate, intersect, perpe-trate, retard, rudimentary, symptom, version, agitate, civic, clarify, collide,compute, controversy, interact and interlude. Inadvertently9, all of the 18

9 This may have been because English native speakers tend to find words of Latin

origin more difficult than others. I think most foreigners would disagree with this.


words are of Latin origin. First, this means these are all words that aretypical of a particular kind of discourse (written, intellectual, non-fiction). Second, in my experience for Western and non-Western learn-ers alike Latin words of this kind are easier to learn than Anglo-Saxonwords, for reasons I can only guess at. If, apart from that, the subjectshad themselves a Neo-Latin background, a circumstance not revealed inthe article, to grasp the meaning of these words would be an utterlysimple task. Along the same line of thought, we could even consider thedifference in impact of examples on learners coming from different lan-guage families: agglutinative, analytic, incorporating, or inflectional. Thevariables are countless.

With regards to tests, there are apparently two possibilities. In onecase, researchers have a precise idea of what they want to prove andthey devise their tests accordingly. The results are then what was ex-pected. In another case, they sincerely want to understand the processand they devise the test in a random way as to be sure they are notprejudiced and forecasting the results. In this case, however, the resultsoften contradict common sense. Not everyone recognises this as clearlyas Nesi:

Further investigations of the value of examples in learner’s dictionary entrieswill need to develop a more sensitive method of measuring almost impercep-tible developments in word knowledge resulting from dictionary consultation.(…) Qualitative rather than quantitative methods may prove more appropri-ate… (1996: no page, electronic version.)

It was this last reference to qualitative instead of quantitative re-search which seemed to me of the utmost interest, hopefully marking aturning point in lexicographic research.

2. DICTIONARIES AND COMPUTERS

Nesi wrote an account of three electronic learner’s dictionaries, TheLongman Interactive Dictionary (1993), The Electronic Oxford Word-power Dictionary (1994) and Collins Cobuild on CD-ROM (1995). Sheclaims the following are the ‘areas in which electronic dictionaries canexcel’:


They can cross-reference within and between sources published separately inbook form, they can provide direct links to other computer applications, theycan enable ‘fuzzy’ and complex searches, and they can interact with users tohelp develop vocabulary and dictionary skills. (No page number, electronicversion.)

Until now electronic dictionaries have exploited only a few of thesepossibilities and, as Sue Atkins states, existing dictionaries ‘may evencome to you on a CD-ROM rather than in book form, but underneaththese superficial modernisations lurks the same old dictionary.’ (Atkins,1996:515)

A research project by Atkins (1996) is one of the few that takecomputers into account. She claims that technological advances havemade it possible to meet the needs of foreign language learners muchbetter than before and that, although electronic dictionaries have beenpublished in a number of languages, the computer’s potentialities havehardly been exploited. Atkins sums up the most important features thatan electronic dictionary could have:

- hypertext functionality eliminating linear text restrictions and opening theway to new types of information by offering new ways of presenting it;- no space constraints other than the need to avoid swamping the user;- no distortion of the source language description by the needs of the targetlanguage;- flexible compiling liberated from alphabetical order;- alternative ways of presenting the information, as for example graphics;- rapid access to large amounts of lexicographical evidence in corpora;- large scale user customisation. (1996:527)

The scope of Atkins’ research is limited to bilingual dictionaries,however, and she sums up a few of their defects which could be reme-died in electronic versions. She mentions, for instance, the high level ofredundancy which makes bilingual dictionaries cumbersome to use fordecoding. Apart from that, she claims, these dictionaries show gaps inthe coverage of neologisms and polysemous words. Additionally, there isat times distortion of the source language part, because of the targetlanguage: particular senses of a word are grouped only because theyhappen to be translated by the same word. Finally, current bilingualdictionaries lack information on collocations and synonyms. These de-fects, Atkins claims, can be corrected by means of a ‘multilingual hy-


pertext lexical resource’ using databases in several languages. In this‘resource,’

the monolingual databases are real;links (including metalanguage and instructions) between database items arereal;the dictionaries themselves are virtual. (p. 531)

Atkins admits there are practical and commercial obstacles to thisproject10. In my opinion, it has a few other flaws as well.

First, I am not sure if this new model, instead of starting from theneeds of the dictionary user, does not start from the bilingual dictionaryas it is today. If so, this prevents the lexicographers from tackling theproblem at its root and building up the solution from there. Addition-ally, I am not sure if Fillmore’s ‘frame theory,’ the semantic theory usedto design Atkins’ electronic dictionary, did not put a burden on the dic-tionary right from the start. It is essential to have a theoretical under-standing of the area one is dealing with. However, to let this theory bethe guiding principle for compiling a dictionary is a different thing. Thisis my conclusion after looking at the model entry crawl on the diction-ary’s homepage. It is of great linguistic interest and shows clearly howthe word relates to others. However, does the mind of the intended useroperate this way?

Another criticism I have of Atkins’ plan is that she limits her pro-posals to bilingual dictionaries, yet there is no technical reason formaintaining the boundaries between different lexicographic genres(monolingual, bilingual, thesaurus, synonyms, etymology, etc.) whencomputers are involved. Should the integration of various lexicographicgenres into one not be one of the starting points of a new electronic dic-tionary? This does not mean putting all the different dictionaries on oneCD-ROM, but integrating them into a single tool. As Atkins herself es-tablished in her survey (Atkins and Varantola, 1996), encoders use sev-eral dictionaries to obtain a single piece of information.

A new electronic dictionary should take advantage of the almostunlimited capacities of electronic storage and put to use all the different 10 Atkins’ model is complex and ambitious and she doubts if an editor will take the

risk to compile it. The sample on the web site, however, still looks like a traditionaldictionary (http:// www. linguistics. berkeley.edu/hyperdico/).


kinds of lexicographic and encyclopaedic knowledge accumulated overthe centuries. From an electronic point of view, several sources of in-formation can be available at the same time. It is possible to match thedifferent parts of a dictionary, indeed of several dictionaries, with thedifferent steps of a learner’s query, merging a number of search utilitiesregardless of what they were originally designed for. Some of this mate-rial will be ready for immediate incorporation into some new structure;other elements will have to be adapted.

3. THE NEED FOR A NEW KIND OF RESEARCH

There are two direct routes to more effective dictionaryuse: the first is to radically improve the dictionary; thesecond is to radically improve the users. If we are to doeither of these things – and obviously we should try todo both – the sine qua non of any action is a very de-tailed knowledge of how people use dictionaries at pre-sent. (Atkins and Varantola, 1997:1)

Over the last 30 years or so, lexicographers have been studying in-tensely the lack of correspondence between dictionaries and their users.The problem has been tackled in several ways, the main one beingquestionnaires and tests. These have by now brought forth all the infor-mation they could possibly produce. At the same time, technological in-novations make it feasible to disregard any restrictions caused by lexi-cography’s traditional hindrances: lack of space and linear ordering.

Methods such as questionnaires make an epistemological leap frombehaviour to needs. If a survey concludes that spelling is why learnersuse a dictionary most frequently, this does not mean dictionaries shouldspecialise in spelling, nor that it is the learners’ most urgent need.Questionnaires always work within the realm of what is possible. Needsexceed this realm and point to what is not yet existent. Paradoxically, inthe history of mankind, solutions often have preceded problems and thesoftware industry of the last few years –as the invention of printing– hasclearly demonstrated this. In the case of questionnaires and tests, oneinvestigates what is apparent. When not predictable, the results are of-ten doubtful. Investigating the link between needs and habits is usefulonly to find out how learners at present tackle the problems which cur-rent dictionaries are expected to solve. They reveal what the needs are


to the extent that they are soluble by already existing means.

If we succeed in using computers adequately for lexicographic pur-poses this will render obsolete a large number of research publicationson grammar codes, phonetic alphabet, number of examples, the needfor synonyms, the need for encyclopaedic information, the place wherelearners look up multi-word items, classification of fixed expressions,and others. If qualitative research results fed this technology, a blueprintcould be drawn up and give rise to a major revolution in the world oflexicography.

In the following chapter, I give an idea of how qualitative researchcan be carried out. It is rather labour intensive, but it gives a clear over-view of the issues under investigation. I chose examples as the topic ofthis research since I think they are one of the most important and leaststudied elements of foreign language lexicography.

EXAMPLES: THE CORE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEXICOGRAPHY 55

CHAPTER 3

EXAMPLES: THE CORE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE

LEXICOGRAPHY

1. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

1. The Research on Examples

Before Cobuild started using its corpus to retrieve dictionary examplesin 1987, little had been published on the subject. Up to then, the prob-lem of examples had been virtually ignored and it was presumably con-sidered minor when compared to topics such as the “definition ofmeaning,” or “translational equivalents.” Choosing an example to illus-trate the meaning of an item for decoding is probably not as difficult aschoosing one to show how an item can be used productively. In addi-tion, since until recently dictionaries were primarily used to understandtexts, not to produce them, not much effort had been spent on thisquestion. Traditionally, the lexicographer makes up the examples. Innative speaker’s dictionaries, their length is kept to a minimum. Inlearner’s dictionaries, they are linked very closely to semantically re-lated items. The native option gives examples like ‘The sale drew largecrowds.’ (draw in the Random House Webster’s), the learner’s option


‘She hammered the nail into the wall.’ (hammer in the Oxford Word-power).

In both cases, the user is offered an example of how the item canbe used, without much information about how it should be used. Thisconcern became important only when dictionaries started helpinglearners to produce in a foreign language. Cobuild first gave encodinglearners authentic examples that were thought to be more adapted toencoding needs. Whether this option was the most sensible one will bediscussed later in this chapter, but Cobuild deserves credit for puttingexamples at the forefront.

Since I have discussed a number of articles published on thesubject in Chapter 2, I will limit this overview to a few highlights. In1992, Ahmad, Fulford and Rogers published an article titled ‘Theelaboration of special language terms: the role of contextual examples,representative samples and normative requirements.’ Apart from theresults of a questionnaire conducted among lexicographers on theperceived function of examples, which will be discussed below, theauthors mention a series of criteria they claim should inform the choiceof examples. Although the area of Ahmad, Fulford and Rogers isspecifically terminology, these criteria are worth quoting:

a. Avoid examples containing pronouns referring outside the exampleb. Avoid examples containing more than two other technical termsc. Avoid examples with a complex structured. Avoid examples which are longe. Favour examples which are a complete sentencef. Favour examples where the term appears early on rather than late (Ahmadet al., 1992:146)

Also mentioned in this article are the criteria which lexicographersthemselves felt to be important for the choice of examples: ‘typicality;naturalness; length; usefulness of syntactic information provided by theexample; semantic complexity of the example.’ (142) The fact that inthe lexicographers’ answers no reference was made to the distinctionencoding/decoding indicates that, at the time, the issue was not apriority.

In 1993, Batia Laufer conducted an experiment at the University ofHaifa on ‘The effect of dictionary definitions and examples on the useand comprehension of new L2 words.’ As was mentioned before, Laufer


found that for encoding purposes, combined entries were better than adefinition alone and a definition alone was better than an examplealone. For decoding purposes also, combined entries were better than adefinition or an example alone. When used separately, definitions andexamples were equally efficient. (Laufer, 1993:140) I already pointedout my reservations regarding this kind of research, but the results areworth considering.

Since access to both a definition and an example increases the netamount of information, it should not be surprising that learners who hadaccess to combined entries had the best results. Yet, it is contrary to mypersonal experience that in the case of encoding a definition alone isbetter than an example alone. Maybe the subjects were still unsure as tothe meaning of the item. Less astonishing, but worth keeping in mind, isthe fact that in the case of decoding, an example would be just asefficient as a definition.

An internal Cobuild paper (Harvey and Yuill, 1992) contradictsLaufer‘s conclusions, at least to a certain extent. This research wasbased on an ‘introspective’ questionnaire given to 211 informants aftera production test. Since Cobuild commissioned the project, a great dealof attention was given to examples. Harvey and Yuill conclude thatlearners prefer to turn to the examples rather than to the definition inorder to work out the meaning of a word (Harvey K. and Yuill D.,1992:20). This leaves us wondering whether the examples areparticularly suited to explain meaning, or whether definitions areparticularly bad at it. Here too, the research team acknowledges defectsinherent in the research method. Indeed, some subjects reported thatthey found a particular piece of information in places where thisinformation had not been provided! (p.10) Not surprisingly, given whocommissioned the research, Harvey and Yuill defend the use ofauthentic examples, a view questioned by Laufer.

In Hong Kong, Amy Chi and Stella Yeung (1996) carried out asurvey in which they reached the same conclusions as Harvey and Yuill.Learners said they preferred to use the examples in an entry tounderstand the meaning of a word.

In the case of using dictionaries for examples, 64% of the studentssaid they had been taught in class how to use example(s) of a given wordfor reference in their own writing (Q.18) when in fact, examples came


fourth in the ranking we set for Q.14. Moreover, when students wereasked ‘How do you usually decide which one best explains your words?’(Q.16) (Appendix VIII), over half of the students said they would usethe example(s) given to decide which explanation is most appropriate.(No page number, electronic version.)

Since this survey consisted of a questionnaire, I think the resultsshould be treated with some caution. However, these findings coincidewith one’s own experience. Since the mind is lazier than the body, onecan expect a learner to prefer a concrete example to a definition whichis always a micro exercise in philosophy.

In Chapter 2, I discussed Nesi’s research on examples in theLongman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE). The results ofthis experiment show how little examples have been examined and howsurprising the results can be when they are. One could question theoverall validity of the results of Nesi’s experiment, and she herself pointsout some of its possible flaws. However, I tend to agree with her whenshe claims that:

The number of example sentences provided by LDOCE for each target wordranged from none (for compute) to five (for version), but, surprisingly, no ap-parent policy seems to account for this variation. (No page number, electronicversion.)

According to my own research, this apparent lack of policy iswidespread and not simply a LDOCE characteristic.

2. Types of Examples

Several different types of utterances are traditionally considered appro-priate dictionary examples. Hausmann (1979) comes up with definitionsfor these types, distinguishing free associations, collocations, and fixedexpressions. I would reformulate his distinction in terms of Sinclair’stheories (1991: Chapter 8, throughout) and subdivide examples intothose that abide by the open-choice principle, idioms, and fixed expres-sions11. I will illustrate this briefly be means of a few examples takenfrom the entry for road in the Collins Spanish Dictionary.

The open-choice principle. An example such as the road to Teruel 11 The terminology of this chapter is explained in the Glossary at the end of the book.


shows the target word road used in its core meaning: ‘the most frequentindependent sense’ (Sinclair 1991:113). On each side of road a numberof lexical items can be filled in: the road to Teruel goes that way, it wouldbe better to find the road to Teruel, there must be a road to Teruel, etc.There are evidently limitations as to what kind of words can abut thetarget word (on, at, from, up, into, down, off, along, across, to name onlythe prepositions), but it is still a large list.

The idiom principle. The example to get a show on the road, listedunder road in the Collins Spanish Dictionary, illustrates the difficultiessurrounding idioms. Though undoubtedly a cautious lexicographer, theperson in charge of the entry road took a few liberties with to get a showon the road. According to the Cobuild corpus, one can only get this showon the road or get the show on the road or get someone’s show on theroad. Given these few possibilities, to get a show on the road qualifies forthe title of idiom. Get a show on the road, as Collins Spanish claims,does not seem to be acceptable. Idioms are more flexible than fixedexpressions, but their possibilities of variation are restricted. In thewords of John Sinclair:

The individual words which constitute idioms are not reliably meaningful inthemselves, because the whole idiom is required to produce the meaning. Idi-oms overlap with collocations, because they both involve the selection of twoor more words. At present, the line between them is not clear. In principle,we call co-occurrences idioms if we interpret the co-occurrence as giving asingle unit of meaning. If we interpret the occurrence as the selection of tworelated words, each of which keeps some meaning of its own, we call it a col-location. (Website ‘Corpus linguistics,’ http:// clg1.bham.ac.uk/ glossary.html)

As Sinclair convincingly states, people speak and write mainly bycombining chunks of language, not words. In an idiom, a word acquiresa new meaning, apart from when it is used independently. Therefore,the meaning which people intuitively give to a word is a criterion fordistinguishing parts of text created on the basis of the open-choiceprinciple and parts created on the idiom-principle. When a word in a textcannot be taken in its core meaning, then it is part of an idiom12.

12 Verbal artists choose words, rarely chunks of words, while ordinary people do not

usually speak in words, but in chunks. The Brazilian translator and critic BorisSchnaiderman told me that Nabokov was considered a fairly traditional writer inRussia, contrary to what people thought of him in the West. When writing in Eng-


Fixed expressions. Fixed expressions are a more familiar concept.They are traditionally stored in the examples section of a dictionaryentry, even when they do not allow for variation. In the case of one forthe road, there is less possibility for variation than in the case of idioms.Fixed expressions do not allow any creativity on behalf of the speaker.Furthermore, their meaning cannot be deduced from the sum of theelements. In one for the road, one cannot be normally replaced by two orany other number, unless jokingly, nor can one speak of one ‘on’ theroad or one ‘off’ the road. The essential difference between idioms andfixed expressions is the possibility or not of altering the order of theelements or squeezing an element in between.In conclusion, the different kinds of examples can be put on a cline withthe road to Teruel on one side, one for the road on the other and the id-iom get the show on the road in between. The closer the item is to a fixedexpression, the less its overall meaning can be deduced from the sum ofthe meaning of its separate elements. Fixed expressions and idioms are,to a variable extent, chosen by the speaker as wholes; they are chunksacting as large single words.

I define examples in the strict sense of the word as all utterancesthat do not show the target word in a fixed environment. In the case ofroad this is exemplified by the main road is very busy at times or youmust take compulsory basic training before you are allowed to ride on theroad (taken from The Bank of English). They show the application of therule by which the word road is governed in contexts in which it does notdepend on other words to convey its meaning.

On the other hand, examples such as one for the road are entities intheir own right. This sentence can be regarded as a single choice towhich firstly apply the rules for ‘one for the road,’ and only afterwardsthe ones for ‘road.’ The kind of example users are interested in dependson the activity they are pursuing. For decoding, fixed expressions and, toa lesser degree, idioms are extremely useful. For encoding, examplesthat show the constraints on the word in an open-choice environment aremore useful. (I will come back to this in Chapter 4.)

lish, since his command of English was not perfect, Nabokov was thinking inwords. This was his guarantee of originality. Likewise, when Mallarmé said: ‘Mais,Degas, ce n’est point avec des idées que l’on fait des vers. C’est avec des mots,’ heunknowingly referred to the idiom principle.


3. The Function of Examples

For all the doubtfulness of their methodology, surveys show that in thecase of learner’s dictionaries, users see the function of examples as anaid to working out the meaning of a hard word. They prefer to read theexamples instead of trying to decipher the definition (Chi, 1996; HarveyK. and Yuill D., 1992:20). This is interesting, because even if fleshingout the definition may reasonably be regarded as one of the examples’functions, it remains surprising that learners prefer to use them insteadof the definitions. This is surely something dictionary compilers do nothave in mind when they write a dictionary. Drysdale (1987:215) sumsup what he sees as the functions of examples as follows:

1. To supplement the information in a definition.2. To show the entry word in context.3. To distinguish one meaning from another.4. To illustrate grammatical patterns.5. To show other typical collocations.6. To indicate appropriate registers or stylistic levels.

It is true that these criteria are rather vague. One might fail to seehow to ‘show the entry word in context’ would not be some sort ofsuperordinate for all the other features. Similarly, there does not seemto be much of a difference between ‘to supplement the information in adefinition’ and ‘to distinguish one meaning from another.’ In 1992,however, these criteria still agreed with those of the lexicographersthemselves. In the previously mentioned survey by Ahmad, K. et al.(1992), lexicographers declared that examples were ‘to enable the userto distinguish between senses; to provide usage evidence; to showtypical collocations; to amplify and clarify definitions; to show typicaluse of words.’ (1992:142) I have not found much more preciseinformation on what purpose examples are supposed to serve. Not muchresearch has been done on them and I know of no study on whatrequirements they should fulfil depending on what activity they areinvolved in.

4. Examples for Decoding and Examples for Encoding

For the problem at hand – the choice of examples, – the distinctionbetween encoding and decoding is of great importance. A decodinglearner is interested in the meaning of a lexical item, whereas an encod-


ing learner is interested in a word’s syntactic features and collocates.How can one example satisfy these divergent needs, how can one exam-ple serve such different types of users? This question had not beenproperly addressed until recently. Examples were chosen to satisfy na-tive and non-native speakers involved in both encoding and decoding,with a clear emphasis on the latter. Even in the more advanced andclearly encoding Longman Language Activator, no special policy forchoosing examples for encoding is perceptible. It is no surprise thataround 40 years after Hornby’s invention of the learner’s dictionary,some people were still complaining that the made-up examples inlearner’s dictionaries were part of the definitions and that the main pur-pose of examples was to ‘clarify the explanations’ (Sinclair in Cobuild I,1987:XV).

2. EXAMPLES IN LEARNER’S DICTIONARIES. THEPROBLEM OF COLLOCATION AND SYNTAX.

In order to see what logic underlies the choice of examples in learner’sdictionaries, I examined the entries for road in Collins Cobuild EnglishLanguage Dictionary 1 (1987) and 2 (1995), Longman Dictionary ofContemporary English (1995), Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary ofCurrent English (1989) and Oxford Wordpower (1993)13. I chose roadsimply because, since it is a very frequent word, a wealth of examplesare listed under this entry. Overall, all five dictionaries follow roughlythe same pattern. Cobuild has more and longer examples. Cobuild andLongman tend to give full sentences, whereas the OALD gives only shortstrings of words. Oxford Wordpower has both long and short examples.The OALD has a higher percentage of sayings and fixed expressions,while Longman, Oxford Wordpower and Cobuild concentrate on non-idiomatic uses. What is the classification of the examples in these dic-tionaries?

1. Classification

In all five dictionaries, the classifying principle of the examples for theentry road is meaning. All entries are subdivided according to the dif-

13 Appendix 1 lists all the examples.


ferent senses which road can have. Within this classification into senses,there is precedence of the literal sense (i.e. piece of ground between twoplaces) over the figurative one (i.e. way or course). Fixed expressions –not examples in the strict sense of the word – come at the end. The firstsenses in the entry always have the greatest number of examples. Addi-tionally, all dictionaries list more examples for literal senses than forfigurative ones. This appears to be a common rule.

Within this general classification, there are further minorsubdivisions. In Cobuild1’s third subdivision and Longman’s first, theexamples show a list of prepositions commonly used with the word road.Apparently, within the classification based on meaning, a syntacticorganisation tacitly takes over. This suggests that there is a link betweena particular sense of road and these prepositions. This is not inaccordance with the truth. In other places the information contained inthe examples highlights some sort of syntactic particularity (‘If you getonto the ring road you’ll avoid the town centre,’ Oxford Wordpower), acollocate (‘a busy road,’ Longman), or a multi-word item (‘he was killedin a road accident,’ Longman). It is impossible to avoid transmitting thiskind of information while conveying meaning, but there are differencesin emphasis. Any example transmits information on meaning, but notevery example transmits adequate syntactical or collocationalinformation.

I shall now look at the road examples from the point of view of theiruse for a decoding and for an encoding learner, respectively. Personally,I do not think that examples in a learner’s dictionary are the mostadequate decoding aids, but since learner’s dictionaries aim at helpinglearners with both processes, and quite a few learners maintain they useexamples to work out the meaning, I will discuss both encoding anddecoding.

2. Decoding

The classification of examples that I described is one to which dictionaryusers have become accustomed and which seems self-evident. Yet, Iquestion its worth. When decoding – reading – one is dealing with themeaning of a lexical item. This is an easy task for a dictionary. The mostlogical thing for a reader to do is to look up the hard word in a bilingualdictionary and then let the context correct any inaccuracies. Yet, this is


not everybody’s standpoint. Supposing that learners should use learner’sdictionaries to find out the meaning of a word, this could be done moreeffectively if examples did not have to illustrate other features of thelexical item (collocates, prepositions, etc.) apart from its meaning. Thesefeatures inevitably make the comprehension of the example more diffi-cult since they make it more complex. When the example repeats thedefinition, as Sinclair criticises, it clarifies the meaning of the word moreeffectively, but it is necessarily unnatural. ‘She hammered the nail intothe wall’ can clarify the meaning of hammer and nail, but it remainsdoubtful if it is a very natural sentence to say.

The first Cobuild2 example, There was very little traffic on the roads,transmits the meaning of road efficiently since traffic situates the word ina precise co-text and on limits the kind of words by which roads isfollowed. In this sentence, few other words can replace roads, and sinceno syntactic intricacies render the understanding of the exampledifficult, it is possible to infer a more or less correct meaning from theexample. There are, of course, other problems which any lexicographerwill be hard-pressed to solve and which derive from the flaw inconception common to all learner’s dictionaries: the fact that traffic is aless frequent word than road. This problem is difficult to solve since fewwords are easier than road. In this case, the intention was probably,first, to locate road in an unequivocal traffic. As an illustration of themeaning, this example is one of the best ones, but it also highlights theproblem in its entirety. It is difficult to transmit the meaning, particularlyof very frequent words, through an example. The best one can do isattempt to not suggest a false meaning. Jain (1981) did some interestingresearch on this point, showing that dictionary examples often induceexactly this: the wrong meaning.

The rest of the examples in this entry, all clear, help to successfullycircumscribe the word. For comparison purposes, we can look at theCobuild I examples: There is an antique shop at the top of my road andthe quiet Edgbaston road where he had lived for some thirty years. Inboth cases, if road were replaced by another word both these sentenceswould still make sense. This does not mean that these examples are notuseful for other purposes, but they do not work for decoding.

In Longman, the example a busy road does not give any conclusiveinformation about the meaning of the word and the intention was


obviously to show a significant collocate. At the end of the road does giveinformation about the meaning and We live just down the road fulfilsboth the conditions of conveying the meaning adequately by using morefrequent words than road, and transmitting a useful collocate (live justdown…). This example ought therefore to be placed first.

***

Examples play a role in the elucidation of a word’s meaning and this is adeclared intention of the dictionaries under investigation. If so, exam-ples should be chosen with this goal in mind. If not, learners may re-place the target word with a lexical item that has a roughly similar syn-tactic behaviour, but that in reality means something different. The fol-lowing Cobuild2 examples for play down are an illustration of this: West-ern diplomats have played down the significance of the reports. He playsdown rumours that he aims to become a Labour MP. Both London andDublin are playing the matter down. In these sentences, play down canbe replaced by take interest in, or reject, or some other verb. This meansthat while a learner would surely extract a meaning from these exam-ples, it could well be the wrong meaning.

I am not aware of any research claiming that learners get moreinformation from a dictionary definition than from a translationcombined with the context in which the word was found. I think that fordecoding purposes, bilingual dictionaries would be more suited if theyhad the same coverage as monolingual dictionaries. Since this is not thecase, learners dealing with a more specialised kind of vocabulary willnecessarily have to use a monolingual dictionary. Moreover, givencurrent practices, and with teachers advising their students to usemonolingual dictionaries instead of bilingual ones, the meaningtransmitted by examples continues to be crucial. Either learners have tobe advised to switch to bilingual dictionaries again, or lexicographersshould consider this point and choose examples which transmit themeaning of a word unequivocally. Because of the very nature oflanguage, I am aware of the fact that this is an extremely difficult task.

3. Encoding

An encoding learner needs much more information than a decodinglearner and the information is of a different nature. When encoding


learners look up a word they already know its meaning to some extent.They may want to confirm this meaning, but their main interest is usage,a combination of syntax and collocation. This kind of information can betransmitted directly or indirectly: directly, by means of grammar formu-las and lists of collocates, or indirectly by means of examples. Examplesare the way in which learners expect to find this kind of information inthe dictionary. Particularly in the case of grammar, an example is moresignificant than the cryptic rules we find in current dictionaries. How-ever, the classification of examples is anything but adapted to queriesabout usage.

In the unlikely case that learners look up road for decodingpurposes in a monolingual dictionary and understand the meaning of theword by reading the definition ‘way between places’ (OALD) they willnot bother to see their view confirmed by the examples the road toBristol/Bristol road (OALD) or There was very little traffic on the roads(Cobuild). These examples are aimed at encoding users who would liketo know if one can say, for instance, Bristol road as well as the road toBristol. However, as we saw in the previous section, encodinginformation has been classified entirely according to decoding needs,making it tiresome for encoding users to retrieve it. This can be seen inthe first subdivision of the Longman entry, which deals with the mainliteral sense of road.

1. a busy road2. at the end of the road3. We live just down the road.4. It takes three hours by road.5. Take the main road out of town and turn left at the first light.6. He was killed in a road accident.7. Kids of that age have no road sense.8. A road safety campaign.Fig. 1 Examples for road in Longman.

The entry was obviously compiled in a very orderly fashion. The firstexample gives us a collocate that can help to understand the word’smeaning, allowing for the fact that busy is a less frequent word thanroad. Examples 2, 3 and 4 give syntactic information on prepositions,less likely to be known by the learner. Example 5 gives the learner acollocate (main), and 6, 7 and 8 show collocates which amount to multi-word items. Who benefits from these examples? I am not sure if encod-


ers will benefit from the syntactic information. At most, encoding learn-ers will see their assumptions confirmed and their doubts dispelled.They can suspect that one can say ‘just down the road’ and, indeed,find the phrase in the dictionary. Yet, since the list is anything but com-prehensive, this will seldom be more than a happy coincidence.

The multi-word items, on the other hand, are intended for encodersand not for decoders, since there is no explanation of what they mean.Perhaps the lexicographers thought that the multi-word items’ meaningcould be derived from the meaning of the individual words whichcomprise them, but that would be a miscalculation. Road sense isespecially difficult to grasp.What then is the purpose of these multi-word items? It can only be toshow that they exist. If encoders have to translate uma campanha pelasegurança no trânsito14, they will rightly suspect that a road safety cam-paign is the right translation. Unfortunately, the entry does not present acomprehensive list and one can ask why the authors picked out this par-ticular item. The criterion could be frequency, but it remains difficult todeduce from this list of multi-word items what was the real selectionpolicy.

The following are the examples for the first literal sense of road inOxford Wordpower:

1. Is this the right road to Beckley?2. Take the London road and turn right at the first roundabout.3. Turn left off the main (= big, important) road.4. major/minor roads5. If you get onto the ring road you’ll avoid the town centre.6. road signs7. a road junction.Fig. 2 Examples for the first literal sense of road in Oxford Wordpower.

These examples all illustrate, inevitably, some meaning of the wordroad, but do they do anything else? The first three examples all refer tothe same activity: showing the way. They are probably useful, althoughone would expect them to be part of a dialogue in a course book, ratherthan examples in a dictionary. The examples show a few significant ba-sic collocates: ‘right,’ ‘take,’ ‘main.’ The latter is explained betweenbrackets (=big, important) yet the learner is left without any help as re- 14 a road safety campaign


gards the phrase ‘turn left off.’ Example 4 gives collocational informa-tion useful for encoding in the likely case that dictionary users recognisemajor/minor roads as the item they were looking for. Examples 5, 6, and7 seem intended to show a few multi-word items with road in them. Onewould tend to classify this as decoding information, but as before thereis no indication as to what these multi-word items mean.

If one examines the authentic language examples in Cobuild2, onesees that the policy for the choice of examples is not fundamentallydifferent. Yet, the Cobuild authors boast that their choice of examplesreflects their corpus. The following is the first section of the entry,illustrating the literal meaning of road:

1. There was very little traffic on the roads.2. We just go straight up the Bristol Road.3. He was coming down the road the same time as the girl was turning into thelane.4. Buses carry 30 per cent of those travelling by road.5. You mustn’t lay all the blame for road accidents on young people.Fig. 3 Examples illustrating the literal meaning of road in Cobuild2.

These five examples show the most common preposition for road – on –and three significant collocates: ‘go straight up,’ ‘come down’ and‘travel by.’Especially for encoding learners, the possibility of quickly recognisingsought out information is fundamental. Yet, in most dictionaries this in-formation is scattered all over the sometimes very long entries. In theCobuild entry for road this task has been made easier because there isonly one section dedicated to the literal use of the word, and the exam-ples are all grouped. It is, however, strange to find the multi-word item‘road accident’ in this same location. The reasoning must have been thatan accident takes place on a ‘literal’ road.

***

As things stand now, it would be better for learner’s dictionaries to focuson helping learners with encoding and not decoding. Strictly speaking,decoding learners do not need examples. A good bilingual dictionarysolves their problems. If they currently consult examples for informationon meaning, this might indicate the doubtful usefulness of definitions; itdoes not prove that examples are the best way to understand what a


word means. A definition is necessarily more abstract than an exampleand it has to be fleshed out with nouns and verbs to become under-standable.

The consequence of a classification which attempts to fulfil theneeds of both decoding and encoding audiences is that neither of themwill easily find what they are looking for. Decoding learners do notalways find examples that clarify the meaning, and the sequence of theexamples does not take into consideration the needs of encodinglearners. The latter do not always find a sufficient amount of collocatesor syntactic information and have to wade through information unsuitedto their needs.

4. Requirements for examples

In 1981, Béjoint claimed: ‘the best dictionary of encoding is one thatprovides the most detailed guidance on syntax and collocates.’ (Béjoint:1981:210) Next, I will analyse to what extent four learner’s dictionaries,the Cambridge International Dictionary of English, Cobuild I and 2, andthe Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, deal with this issue.

Syntax

Strictly speaking, the difficulty involved in using a lexical item in a for-eign language, and consequently the number of examples needed, isproportional to the difference that exists between this word’s behaviourand that of its equivalent(s) in the learners’ L1. Spanish gustar is a casein point. English-speaking students may experience difficulties usinggustar, a pronominal verb which makes the item one likes become thesubject of the verb (I like books/me gustan los libros). These same stu-dents have few problems using its antonym detestar, because here thesyntactic construction is the same as in English (I hate books/detesto loslibros). Brazilian students have the same difficulties with gustar as Britishones, for the same reason.

It is not the task of dictionaries to teach grammar in a comprehen-sive way, but the dictionary is the place where learners look for infor-mation on particular grammar items such as syntactic constraints.Grammar rules in dictionaries should therefore be both general andspecific. They should be general because there are difficulties commonto all nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc.; they should be specific because every


word has its own syntactic particularities when compared to its equiva-lent(s) in another language. In order to choose truly useful examples,dictionaries should ideally pay attention to the specific problems arisingfrom the contrasting of two languages: the language it is supposed toelucidate and the language of the audience. Speakers of different lan-guages have each different problems and need different examples. In aSpanish-English dictionary, English speakers need a large number ofexamples showing the use of ser and estar, of gustar and so on. Yet, interms of learner’s dictionaries, only Cambridge makes a modest use ofcontrastive information for a number of words identified as false friends.

Since dictionaries do not usually give discursive information aboutsyntax, there are two ways of conveying this: codes and examples. Al-though the first method, as used in Cobuild’s ‘extra column,’ is more di-rect and saves space, it might not be as effective as to put in more ex-amples. The information in the ‘extra column’ repeats the informationgiven in the examples under the form of codes, but this is neither veryclear nor attractive to the common user. The information a learnerneeds may be more readily supplied by a series of examples rather thanby an abstract and abbreviated rule. In addition, a syntactic construc-tion is rarely neutral with regard to collocations. If the number of possi-ble collocates is small, it should be easy to list them all. The list of collo-cates would then also give the list of possible syntactic constructions. Ifthey are too numerous, an appropriate grouping will reveal the regulari-ties.

In what follows, I analyse the case of take a stand and indulge fromthe viewpoint of syntactic information and as conveyed through exam-ples in a learner’s dictionary.

Take a stand

To take a stand is a frequent but difficult expression. It can be used onits own; with different prepositions (on, against, for); or followed by anumber of adverbial phrases. Most dictionaries do not give any indica-tion of these uses. When they do, as in the Cobuild Dictionary on CD-ROM based on Cobuild1, they mention rather enigmatic formulas suchas PHR: VB. – INFLECTS. A look at the Cobuild Collocations CDyields a wealth of examples displaying a variety of syntactic structuresfor take a stand. They even show secondary syntactic information, such


as the fact that the infinitive form is by far the most common one, andthat against – and not on, as other dictionaries suggest – is the mostfrequent preposition. The following table shows examples retrieved fromthe Cobuild Collocations CD.

it’s time to take a standon the movement to take a resolute stand against Iraqfelt it was important to take a stand against SouterLaw Lords yesterday failed to take a stand against that moral declineby failing to take a strong stand against the studentsto take such a stand attacks the credibility of the FASBJoanna decided to take a stand herselfbelieve that he will take a tougher stand in negotiations with the ChineseI wouldn’t expect him to take a stand like that against Jews or blacksgovernment finally decided to take a stand not because it believedto take a more principled standthe group insisted he take a stand to overturn Amendment 2doesn’t know whether to take a standFig. 4 Examples for take a stand retrieved from the Cobuild Collocations CD

The examples above were not carefully chosen. They were me-chanically retrieved from a corpus and listed in a random fashion. Still,the information they provide is much richer than the dictionary entry. Itis also much more accessible to the learner than an abstract rule or,even worse, its abbreviated form. When using a corpus, learners areable to retrieve, and sort at their leisure, a large number of examples.This makes the use of grammar rules superfluous altogether. It alsoguarantees learners to reach information of which the lexicographer isoften not even aware.

Indulge

Indulge is another illustration of the problem of conveying syntactic in-formation. It has at least two possible constructions and, in none of thelanguages with which I am familiar, it can be translated by a single verbwith the same syntactic particularities as in English. Consequently, fromthe moment one is sure that indulge is the right word to use, one has tostart the struggle to get the syntax right. A French speaking learnercould be fairly sure that indulge is the verb which best translatess’adonner à, taking into account the possible pragmatic implications suchas the pejorative connotation of the word, irony and slight formality. Still


one can have doubts about how to use this verb with such a difficultsyntactic pattern. Is it indulge in or indulge with or by? Is it indulge one-self in or indulge oneself without any preposition? To what extent do ex-amples help the learner with this dilemma? These are the Cobuild2 ex-amples for indulge:

Only rarely will she indulge in a glass of wine.He returned to Britain so that he could indulge his passion for football.You can indulge yourself without spending a fortune.He did not agree with indulging children.Fig. 5 Cobuild2 examples for indulge.

Cobuild mentions two senses for indulge:

1. If you indulge in something or if you indulge yourself, you allow yourself to haveor do something that you know you will enjoy.2. If you indulge someone, you let them have or do what they want, even if this isnot good for them.Fig. 6 Cobuild2 examples for indulge.

Two of the examples illustrate two possible constructions corre-sponding to the first meaning, and two illustrate the second one. Theconstructions which convey the first meaning are: indulge in + a noun;indulge + a noun. Two examples is probably what a native speakerfinds more than sufficient, but for a learner, unless there is an equiva-lent in the learner’s first language with the same syntactic behaviour,this is not enough. These entries seem to indicate that there was noawareness that indulge is a difficult verb, which is the reason why it istreated in exactly the same way as most other verbs. However, withouteven trying to translate it, the lexicographers should have been aware ofthe difficulty of this verb for a learner because of the number of its pos-sible constructions. In the case of the Cobuild entry, the problem is thata general rule of thumb – one example per construction – was appliedto a particular case, instead of tailoring rules to specific verbs. The cho-sen examples are excellent, but not nearly enough to allow a learner touse the word productively.

Longman’s examples are less satisfactory than Cobuild’s:


Most of us were too busy to indulge in heavy lunchtime drinking.Eva had never been one to indulge in self pity.I haven’t had strawberries and cream for a long time, so I’m really going to indulgemyself.Ray has enough money to indulge his taste for expensive wines.His mother pampered and spoiled him, indulging his every whim.Fig. 7 Longman examples for indulge.

First, to use the verb four times out of five in the infinitive formgives the learner the erroneous impression that ‘to + indulge’ is theverb’s normal construction. There is an indication in the examples thatthe construction with in can apply to concrete as well as abstract activi-ties (drinking; self-pity), which is indeed a likely question for a learner.However, a single example is not sufficient to retrieve this informationcorrectly; nothing in the examples will prevent a learner from saying*Most of us were too busy to indulge ourselves in heavy lunchtime drink-ing if this information is not given in some other way. Here and in otherdictionaries, the compilers were either unaware of the difficulty of theitem or assumed that the learners had sufficient ‘dictionary skills’ to re-trieve the information by themselves. This suggests once again that oneof the drawbacks of existing dictionaries is that they are in most casescompiled exclusively by native speakers who are understandably yet un-forgivably unaware of the difficulty of their own language.

For indulge, Cambridge gives the following examples:

The soccer fans indulged their patriotism, waving flags and singing songs.With his friend’s family he was able to indulge his passion for the outdoors, espe-cially skiing.I love champagne but it’s not often I can indulge myself.The children indulged me with breakfast in bed.This was a deliberate decision by the company to indulge in a little nostalgia.She was furious with her boss and indulged in rapturous fantasies of revenge.

Fig. 8 Cambridge examples for indulge.

Cambridge gives a few more examples than the other two diction-aries: two with the noun construction, two with in, one pronominal andone with a pronoun. This last one, however, features with in bold, givingthe learner the impression that this is a typical construction, at the samelevel as indulge in. Furthermore, ‘indulge their patriotism’ is a slightlyironic use unlikely to be grasped by the average learner. In addition, the


‘company’ indulging in ‘a little nostalgia’ is not what one would call a‘typical use,’ and ‘rapturous fantasies’ may be a little farfetched for abeginning second language learner.

* * *

As a rule, dictionaries lack examples to highlight syntactic constraints.Instead, perhaps merely to save space, they use codes, supposed to in-dicate how words are used. (These codes, probably justifiable in aprinted dictionary, should not be maintained in an electronic diction-ary.) The above analysis reveals a deficient identification of what the dif-ficult features of the language are –target language for the learner, butsource language for the lexicographer. One has the impression that auniform guideline for the number and type of examples is applied re-gardless of the difficulty of a specific item. However, a learner needsfewer examples for a noun than for a verb, for instance. A flexible ex-amples policy should be applied, adapting the number and kind of ex-amples to the item under analysis.

Finally, if learner’s dictionaries are to help learners with encoding,the selection and sequence of examples should obey a logic of possiblesyntactic constructions and not of senses, even if syntax and meaningare inevitably intertwined15. It is true that encoders want to transmit amessage and that this message is meaning. However, there is a stage inthe encoding process when dictionary users know what lexical item en-codes a specific meaning and where the problem is purely formal. Inthese cases, a classification according to syntactic patterns is more use-ful. Frequently advanced learners are fairly sure of what lexical itemthey should use because their passive knowledge of the language ismuch greater than their active competence. Often the problem referspurely to arbitrary syntactic constraints. Since the dictionary of the fu-ture will be electronic, users will at least be given the option of classify-ing the examples according to either meaning or syntax.

Collocations

Together with information on syntax, collocations are the main reasonwhy encoders use dictionaries. In this section, I will show the results of

15 As research by Gill Francis and her team (1996) has demonstrated.


some research I did on the subject with both monolingual and bilingualdictionaries.

First, the issue of collocations receives surprisingly little attention.Dictionaries provide quite a bit of information on exceptional uses oflexical items but very little on common usage. Fixed expressions aregenerally well represented, whereas little attention is given to everydayuse, as if exceptional use were more difficult. The OALD lists 14 typicalexpressions with cat (it rains cats and dogs, let the cat out of the bag,etc.), but gives no indication on collocates such as feed the cat, let thecat out/in, stroke the cat, etc. The reason is the same as before: learner’sdictionaries were fundamentally designed to serve decoders, not encod-ers, even if their authors state the opposite. Fixed expressions are usefulfor decoders, much less for encoders. Besides, it seems to be easy fornative speakers to think of fixed expressions when asked for them. Nor-mal uses, however, are so much a part of everyday life that nativespeakers are not aware of them in such a way that one can only retrievethese normal uses with the help of a corpus.

Face, fact, failed, fail, and fade

In some research I did on collocations, I compared the presence of col-locates in Cobuild2 and the Cambridge International Dictionary of Eng-lish for the randomly chosen items face, fact, failed, fail, and fade (fulldetails in Appendix 2). Although Cobuild I produced the CollocationsCD from where I took my information, this dictionary scored onlyslightly better than Cambridge. Of the 66 Cobuild examples for face,only 4 contain a collocate; in Cambridge’s 12 examples there are nocollocates at all. One wonders why Cobuild, which signalled its aware-ness of the importance of collocations by producing a Collocations CDand whose theoretician John Sinclair wrote extensively on the subject,dedicated so little attention to this feature. In one case – fact –, Cam-bridge even scored relatively better than Cobuild, even though Cam-bridge had much fewer examples. This makes it seem that when Cobuildgot it right, it was not because of a specific policy but due to a lexicog-rapher’s intuition. In the case of fail, Cambridge manages to show ninesignificant collocates in nine examples. In the overall evaluation, Co-build scores better only because it features a greater number of exam-ples.


‘Criteria’

In another short research project, I looked at the word criteria, the useof which had caused me problems. According to the Cobuild Colloca-tions CD, the most common collocate for criteria is meet. I looked at thefollowing dictionaries: Collins German, Collins Portuguese, Collins Rus-sian, Collins Spanish, Collins-Robert, Collins-Sansoni, Hazon-Garzanti,New Proceed, Oxford Spanish, Oxford-Duden, Oxford-Hachette, Taishu-kan –all major bilingual dictionaries– along with Collins (monolingual),Oxford Wordpower, Longman, Cambridge and Cobuild1 and2. Only Co-build2 and Oxford-Hachette feature an example with meet. These sametwo dictionaries, however, did not have any examples with other highfrequency collocates such as set or apply. This is a surprising resultsince it seems such an obviously useful piece of information that is alsoeasy to provide. There are only a limited number of actions to which cri-teria can be subjected: set, meet, use and apply, or fail to do thesethings. In dictionaries designed with the encoding user in mind, thiskind of information should be included.

‘Proposal’

According to the Cobuild Collocations CD, the most frequent verbs col-locating with proposal are: reject, put forward, make, support, accept, andconsider. In Appendix 3, I list the examples for proposal in five monolin-gual learner’s dictionaries and nine bilingual ones.

OALD. The second edition of the OALD (1963) paid little attentionto collocational information and concentrated on the preposition re-quired for proposal. The 1992 (encyclopaedic) edition shows no system-atic change in this policy. There are more examples, one with put for-ward, but the focus remains on illustrating the use of the preposition. Itis remarkable, however, that from one edition to the other there is atendency to increase the length of examples. Again, this might indicate awelcomed shift in the function of examples from illustrating the meaningto showing how the item functions within a sentence.

Cobuild. An evolution took place between Cobuild1 and Cobuild2.Although the example-like definition used put forward, Cobuild1 exam-ples did not contain a single typical collocate. Cobuild2, however, hasthree: put forward, reject, and accept. An obstacle to more collocational


information may have been the Cobuild ‘authentic example’ policy. Theneed to find ‘typical,’ ‘relevant ,’ and ‘authentic’ examples may haveproved difficult.

Cambridge. Cambridge successfully concentrates collocational in-formation in an example such as: Congress has rejected the latest eco-nomic proposal put forward by the president (the underlining is mine,bold is original). Reject is as much a collocate of proposal as put forwardbut only the latter was highlighted. This might indicate that the presenceof this collocate was coincidental rather than resulting from a policy. Un-fortunately, as the list bears out, there is no indication of the fact thatone can ‘refuse’ a marriage proposal but not, for instance, a peace pro-posal. Overall, it seems difficult to discern a rationale behind the choiceof examples. There are a few collocates, a few prepositions, and a fewtypical constructions present, but none of these areas has been givenextensive treatment.

***

There are indications that lexicographers are becoming increasinglyaware of the need for dictionaries to become tools for encoding and notonly for decoding. However, this switch is still not apparent in the sec-tion which is the main aid for encoders: the examples. My analysis sug-gests that there is some concern with syntax, but much less with collo-cates. There seems to be at present no genuine policy regarding theseissues. The main reason for this is that dictionaries do not choose be-tween encoding and decoding. Decoders should turn to the exampleswhen they are unable to deduce the meaning of a lexical item from thedefinition. Otherwise, examples should concentrate on giving informa-tion on syntax and collocation.


3. COBUILD AND AUTHENTIC VS. MADE-UP EXAMPLES

The authentic vs. made-up debate became a focus of attention when thefirst Cobuild dictionary was published in 1987, and authentic languagewas first directly used as a means to supply examples for dictionary en-tries. Using authentic language was not in itself a novelty. In the field ofnative speaker’s dictionaries, Dr. Johnson used authentic language in hisDictionary of the English Language (1755) and present-day lexicogra-phers use ‘citation files’ with authentic language to compile their dic-tionaries. However, there are a few differences between traditional lexi-cographers and Cobuild.

Before Cobuild, ‘authentic’ language had never been tried out onlearners. The difficulties in terms of vocabulary and syntax were consid-ered too great. The first edition of the Cobuild dictionary was highlycriticised by people like Hausmann and Gorbahn (1989) and to a lesserdegree by Fillmore (1989). In reality, the level of EFL learners hasprobably improved due to globalisation and the dominant role of Eng-lish as a koine. Cobuild offered the first response to this trend.

The second difference between Cobuild and traditional dictionariesis that, until recently, citation files were used as a source of inspirationrather than to provide on-hand examples. Cobuild takes its examples di-rectly from the corpus and puts them into the dictionary with little or nomodification.

Finally, Dr. Johnson, the ‘canonical critic proper’ as Harold Bloomcalls him (1994:183), would never have dreamt of using sources otherthan ‘canonical’ authors, the reason for which his dictionary is still aspleasant to read as a dictionary of quotations. Cobuild uses a corpus thatalso includes literary authors, but consists of non-fiction, newspapers,magazines, and speech examples. From Johnson’s dictionary’s aim –tofix the standard of English–, Cobuild has moved on to a more modernlinguistic conception of describing the language instead of being strictlynormative.


1. The Defence of ‘Authentic Language’

The concept of ‘authentic language’ is not as plain as it may seem. Ac-cording to those who defend the use of ‘authentic language’ in peda-gogic materials, specifically in dictionaries, the fact that a native speakerproduced an utterance does not render it ‘authentic.’ This is even lessso if this utterance was produced to illustrate a grammar item or to showthe meaning of a word. To use John Sinclair‘s (1988) terminology,metalinguistic utterances of this kind can be ‘grammatical,’ but they arenot ‘natural,’ and therefore not ‘authentic.’

The Cobuild undertaking ends up generating indirect criticism ofother learner’s dictionaries for making up samples of language whosemain purpose is to clarify meaning. According to the Cobuild team, thispractice gives an incorrect idea of the language, thus misinforming thelearner. Fox, a senior member of the former Cobuild team, claims: “If aword typically occurs in a sentence which is grammatically complex oralongside vocabulary items that are infrequent, it would be misleadingof a dictionary to present that word in a very simple clause or sentencewith easy vocabulary.” (Fox 1987:138)

According to John Sinclair, each sentence carries with it the char-acteristics of the text from which it was extracted. He calls this phe-nomenon ‘encapsulation.’ In Sinclair’s opinion, “a text is represented atany moment of interpretation by a single sentence… each new sentenceencapsulates the previous one by an act of reference.” (1993:7) Conse-quently, made-up examples are deceptive since the lexical or grammati-cal choices made in them do not depend on any text whatsoever. Theycan be ‘grammatical,’ but they are not ‘natural’ and it is not enough forlearners to be able to produce sentences that are grammatically wellformed. They must also be recognised as ‘natural’ by native speakers(Fox 1987:139). According to the Cobuild team, traditional lexicogra-phers, being native speakers, make up examples that are grammaticallyacceptable, but because their intention is not to communicate anythingother than information on a lexical item, this information is, strictlyspeaking, incorrect. Therefore, in these made-up examples, there is achance that the words carry unwarranted negative connotations, that thecollocates are wrong, and that the syntactic construction is correct yetunusual. In other words, a made-up example has no validity as a model.Sinclair states:


[made-up examples] have no independent authority or reason for their exis-tence, and they are constructed to refine the explanations and in many casesto clarify the explanations. They give no reliable guide to composition in Eng-lish and would be very misleading if applied to that task. (…) Usage cannot beinvented, it can only be recorded. (Sinclair 1987:XV)

Most people will not doubt the exactitude of most of the theoreticalpremises on which the choice for authentic examples was based. Evenso, much criticism has been raised, related not so much to the theoreti-cal premises, but to their practical implications.

2. Criticisms of Cobuild and the Authentic Examples Policy

At the time of its first edition, Cobuild was the only dictionary to use anall-encompassing electronically accessible corpus. Until then, the techni-cal means were hardly available, making the search for and retrieval ofexamples in large databases a difficult task. Yet, the technical side ofthe problem is not at the heart of the matter. Probably the main reasonwhy traditional lexicography did not use authentic language was its lexi-cal and syntactic difficulties. It was also thought that there would be toomuch interference from an absent co-text, whereas examples were sup-posed to teach a particular feature, singled out by the lexicographer andconcocted with this feature in mind. The results of the questionnairedistributed among lexicographers (Ahmad et al., 1992), discussed inChapter 3, confirm this.

In practice, learner’s dictionary publishers seem to have been un-aware of a change in the public’s attitude and needs. Cobuild was thefirst attempt at renewing foreign language lexicography. Criticisms fol-lowed and people like Della Summers (1996) (from Longman) popular-ised a distinction between corpus-based and corpus-bound examples,stressing that lexicographers should find their inspiration in the corpus,check frequencies and collocations, but not be bound to it. In reality,after Cobuild all dictionaries started to use a corpus and to emphasisesuch practice.

***

The debate on authentic examples can be subdivided into two sections:the problem of corpora, and the didactic implications.


3. Corpora

The idea that a corpus is a valuable aid for the compilation of diction-aries has been generally accepted and currently, all learner’s dictionar-ies stress the fact that they use one. It is probably because of Sinclairthat lexicographers have acquired a sound distrust of their own intui-tions, and this applies particularly to making up examples. When com-paring contemporary examples to those of a few decades ago, one no-tices that an effort has been made to make them sound less contrived.Although there are still differences of opinion as to the management of acorpus or its representativeness, all lexicographers now agree that thenon-corpus based dictionary belongs in the past.

Other parts of Sinclair’s theory, however, have not been as widelyaccepted. The authentic/made-up distinction has been empirically ques-tioned. In an experiment conducted in 1992, Batia Laufer concludesthat native speakers are unable to distinguish between authentic andmade-up examples. I myself did a similar experiment with native speak-ers of Portuguese that confirmed Laufer’s results.

This does not necessarily mean there is no difference betweenauthentic and made-up language, it means that this difference is notimmediately apparent even in the eyes of native speakers. One mightcontend that made-up examples only contain information which the lexi-cographer has put in them whereas authentic examples carry data ofwhich the lexicographer is unaware. This, however, is hard to prove anddoes not necessarily mean an improvement for the learner. If authenticlanguage has an unconscious salutary effect, this has not been estab-lished. The idea of ‘encapsulation’ sounds attractive, but if nativespeakers mistake made-up examples for authentic ones, this part of Sin-clair’s theory is not really convincing. Moreover, even if one makes al-lowances for this unproven distinction, the question remains whethercorpus samples should become dictionary examples without any previ-ous adaptation, since dictionary examples fulfil a didactic function.

4. The Didactic Point of View

Cobuild’s claim that learners should learn natural and not grammaticallanguage is controversial. One can accept, even without any empiricalproof, that there is a distinction between the two kinds of language. If


natural language is more valuable because it conveys intended and un-intended information, does this mean that this unintended information isnot conveyed when a lexicographer made up the sentence in order tounderline a particular aspect of a word’s use? In other words, a lexicog-rapher could concoct a sentence to demonstrate a particular aspect of aword –e.g. the different possible syntactic structures of indulge– andunknowingly transmit other information along with it.

Secondly, one wonders if natural language is more suited forteaching than grammatical language. There are several stages in learn-ing a foreign language, each characterised by a particular form of ex-pression. Even very advanced L2 speakers use a language that is differ-ent from a native speaker’s language. Grammatical language is only onestep away from natural language and many advanced learners shouldconsider themselves fortunate if they ever get near it. It could be arguedthat grammatical language can best be taught with sentences made upby a native speaker with a specific purpose. In fact, they allow a lexicog-rapher to point out specific features to the dictionary user. Undoubtedly,this would only really work if lexicographers had a contrastive knowl-edge of the audience’s language, and this is usually not the case. Still,even without this knowledge, grammatical analysis should lead a lexi-cographer to an awareness of the important features a learner shouldknow. Authentic language examples are much harder to control in termsof syntactic and lexical intricacies.

The fact that a sentence is unnatural does not mean that it is not in-structive. To put it in an extreme way, ‘colourless green ideas sleep furi-ously’ may well be meaningless to native and non-native speakers alike,but it teaches a basic English grammar: NP-VP-AP. An unnatural sen-tence such as ‘this is a pencil’ can make a grammar point more clearlythan an authentic example. This does not mean it has to be made-upand unnatural; it means that it very well can be. It all depends on whatis being taught.

In an article I have already commented on, Laufer (1992) reportson an experiment which tested the efficiency of authentic examples asopposed to made-up ones in comprehension and production tasks. Thisleads her to conclude:


Lexicographer’s examples are more helpful in comprehension of new wordsthan the authentic ones. In production of the new word, lexicographer’s ex-amples are also more helpful but not significantly so. (…) The findings suggestthat lexicographer-made examples are pedagogically more beneficial than theauthentic ones (further studies would be useful to substantiate this claim). Ifthis is so, can they be considered as unacceptable on the grounds of lack ofnaturalness? (1992:75-76).

As is the case with a number of experiments conducted in the fieldof language learning, the results of this survey depended on a range ofmore or less disputable decisions. Laufer had to choose a set of exam-ples, then a number of subjects whose previous knowledge was difficultto measure, and eventually she had to write a test which conceivablycould have been written in various other ways. These results, therefore,should be considered with caution.

Furthermore, as Jean Binon pointed out to me, the lexical densityof authentic examples is often so high that understanding them becomesa problem in itself. If one looks at it from a cultural point of view, refer-ences to proper names and dates of events are rapidly outdated and canmake a sentence difficult to understand. In the second edition of theirdictionary, the Cobuild team took special care to avoid this kind of ref-erence. However, to eliminate cultural information entirely is difficult,particularly if you are a member of this culture and unaware of whatothers do not know about it. Language is culture, of course, and thelatter should be transmitted to the learner, but not everything has to belearnt at the same time, and dictionary examples may not be the bestplace for providing cultural information.

Finally, in defence of authentic examples, it can be argued thatthere is a psychological factor which critics rarely or never discuss.Learners seem to tell me that the feeling of being in direct touch with‘authentic English,’ is an asset; they feel like they are already a part ofit. Since language learning remains a largely mysterious psychologicalmatter, this factor –impossible to measure– should be taken into consid-eration.

***

As innovative as Cobuild was, it still seemed to be missing insight onforeign language teaching and learning. In fact, the Longman Language


Activator might be the only dictionary capable of escaping this criticism.No one today denies the validity of using a corpus to analyse language,but the most efficient way to transmit the knowledge obtained via thisanalysis is still up in the air. It is one thing to analyse the language andrealise that, while ‘blatant’ means ‘obvious,’ no native speaker wouldspeak of a ‘blatant choice.’ But another thing is to teach this to learners.If a collection of utterances taken from a corpus reveals a particular us-age pattern for a particular lexical item, this knowledge is certainlyworth transmitting to the learner. However, we still do not know whetherthis knowledge can be conveyed more clearly if one uses raw material.

4. EXAMPLES IN BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES. THEPROBLEM OF CLASSIFICATION.

For foreign language learners, the bilingual dictionary is still the mainreference tool, particularly in the case of encoding. Because of this, oneexpects these dictionaries to pay special attention to examples and tofollow a particular policy in this respect. However, this is not always thecase and the choice of examples often seems rather random. Onceagain, the lack of distinction between decoding and encoding is the mainimpairing factor. In what follows I will illustrate what I think is the dis-tinction between encoding and decoding examples, this time with a focuson bilingual dictionaries. In a subsequent section, I will analyse thechoice and ordering of examples in the case of an advanced traditionalbilingual dictionary, the Collins Spanish Dictionary.

Decoding and encoding. Current bilingual dictionaries attempt tomeet the needs of both decoding and encoding learners. A Spanish-English dictionary is supposed to help Spanish speakers with theunderstanding and production of English while at the same timeassisting English speakers with the understanding and production ofSpanish. Nevertheless, the needs in terms of examples for decoding andencoding are very different.

Indeed, for decoding there is no need for examples in the strictsense of the word. Even if a source word can be translated by severaldifferent words in the target language, the context in which the word wasfound will elucidate any doubts. In a sentence like ‘Ni la solitude ni lesépreuves n’avaient pu venir à bout de cet homme dont l’énergie n’avait


d’égale que l’insensibilité,’ (Gaucher R. 1965 Les Terroristes, Albin,Paris, p.32) any French-English dictionary will tell us that épreuve canmean test, print, and ordeal. Given the context, however small, there canbe no doubt that the correct translation is ‘ordeal.’ An example in thedictionary would have been superfluous.

In the case of encoding, on the other hand, examples are of the ut-most importance, since they help with the choice of the item and showits use. The first function is of great importance, particularly in the caseof beginning learners. Since the translation of a word depends on thecontext, learners will choose a possible translation guided by a label, orby comparing the source sentence to the example sentences. Thus, inthe case of encoding, the learners will need examples in the strict senseof the word. Only advanced learners will want to translate fixed expres-sions.

To understand what the possible problems were, I monitored myown look-ups in Japanese as a beginning learner, and in Italian as anintermediate learner. In both cases I looked up high frequency wordsmore than anything else –words with a large range of meanings andtherefore more likely to be ruled by the open-choice principle.

In English, on the other hand, a language in which I have had toexpress more complex ideas and use more infrequent words, my look-ups concerned collocations and syntax and I have instinctively beenlooking for examples. My quest for examples, I may say, has been tire-less.

The kind of examples decoding and encoding dictionary users needare very different. Decoders are exclusively interested in examples in thebroad sense of the word, whereas encoders need more common uses(see Chapter 3). Since traditional bilingual dictionaries cater to bothkinds of audiences at the same time, in two different languages, it is dif-ficult to meet these needs in a satisfactory manner. This is what I willshow in the following analysis of how examples are handled in the entryfor road in the excellent Collins Spanish-English Dictionary and, morebriefly, in the equally outstanding, but more modern, Oxford-HachetteFrench-English Dictionary.


1. The Examples for Road in Collins Spanish-English

The Collins Spanish Dictionary is a typical example of the more tradi-tional kind of dictionary. Initially a monumental piece of work by a sin-gle individual, the latest editions have benefited from the support of anextended group of lexicographers.

In what follows I look at the examples for the entry road and try tofind out why they were selected or made-up, in order to discover what isthe rationale behind the examples policy in an average traditional bilin-gual dictionary. I look at what their sequencing criteria are and who istheir intended audience. It is important to point out that the CollinsSpanish does not mention whether it used a corpus, which makes me as-sume that it did not; at least not how a corpus is currently defined.

In an ideal dictionary, the selection and ordering of examplesshould be guided by what functions these examples are supposed to per-form. If the main purpose of the dictionary is to help with decoding, thefixed expressions should be listed first, or at least clearly separated fromthe rest. If the purpose is encoding, preference should be given to ex-amples showing the word first in open-choice contexts, then in contextswhere a collocation was required, and finally in fixed expressions. Multi-word items, if not listed as separate entries, should be at the end of theentry.

The original hypothesis of this analysis was that, since bilingualdictionaries had to meet the needs of two different audiences, each withpossibly two different aims, the lexicographers had no other choice thanto make a random selection of examples without considering their pur-poses. The hypothesis appeared to be true. In addition, the analysis ofthe examples revealed that this was a practically untenable position and,in fact, there was a privileged audience. For commercial reasons, how-ever, this kind of bias can never be admitted and the needs of this ‘se-cret’ privileged audience cannot be fully met. A necessarily heterogene-ous product is the eventual outcome.

Order of the Examples

As it was immediately evident that there was no clear-cut classificationfor common uses, idioms and fixed expressions, I tried out a number ofalternative classifications, starting with the one distinguishing literal and


figurative. This classification is the one traditionally used; yet, here too,the criterion was not applied very openly.

Road is a very frequent word. It is used literally as well as figura-tively and there is a Spanish equivalent –camino– whose semantic rangefor the most part covers that of road. This makes a comparison with theSpanish part of the dictionary fairer. If the dictionary is really intendedfor speakers of both languages, words with a relatively equal frequencyand with a comparable semantic distribution should receive a compara-ble amount of attention.

Collins Spanish-English enumerates 38 ‘broad sense’ examples.Below are the examples in the order in which they appear in thedictionary.

1. roads (naut.), road narrows, road up, the road to Teruel, at the 23rd kilometreon the Valencia road, the road to success, one for the road, across the road, shelives across the road from us, by road, my car is off the road, to be on the road, mycar is on the road again, he’s on the road to recovery, we’re on the road to disaster,the dog was wandering on the road, to get (or take) a show on the road, to take tothe road, to be on the right road, to get out of the road, our relationship hasreached the end of the road, to hold the road, to take the road.2. road accident, road construction, road haulage, road haulier, road hump, roadjunction, road racer, road safety, road sense, road tax, road test, road trial, roadtraffic, road transport, road vehicle.Fig. 9 List of the examples for road in Collins Spanish English Dictionary.

Although they are all listed under the same entry, these examplesare very different in character. Group 2 shows multi-word items that areonly listed under the entry because of their spelling. Somewhat surpris-ingly, roads as a nautical term heads the list. If we keep only the exam-ples listed under number 1, minus roads, we are left with 22 examples.A first attempt at classification according to the ‘open-choice vs. idiomprinciple’ shows that this was not the criterion used. The list starts withtwo fixed expressions (road narrows, road up), continues with three ex-amples of open-choice (the road to Teruel, at the 23rd kilometre on theValencia road), then an idiom (the road to success). It continues with afixed expression (one for the road), gives another example of open-choice (across the road, she lives across the road from us), and endswith a typical preposition (by road).


Literal/figurative

Since the distinction literal/figurative is used by the dictionary itself andexplicitly added to two examples (‘to be on the right road and ‘to get outof the road’), I checked to see if this was the rationale behind the selec-tion of the examples. From my experience as a language teacher, I knowthis is one kind of subdivision into which learners expect the examplesin a dictionary to be classified. Whereas the literal meaning of a wordtravels easily from one language to another if the same extra-linguisticreality exists in both languages, the way in which these same words areused to express concepts may well be very different. I listed the exam-ples for road according to this criterion.

Literal Figurative

the road to Teruelat the 23rd kilometre on the Valenciaroadacross the roadshe lives across the road from usthe dog was wandering on the roadto be on the right road (in one sense)to be on the road (in one sense)

road narrowsroad upthe road to successby roadmy car is off the roadto be on the roadmy car is on the road againhe’s on the road to recoverywe’re on the road to disasterto get (or take) a show on the roadto be on the right road (in one sense)(also fig)to get out of the road (fig)one for the roadour relationship has reached the end ofthe roadto take to the roadto hold the roadto take the road (to X para ir a X)

Fig. 10 Classification of the examples according to their literal or figurative use (theindications found in the dictionary are in parentheses).

Even allowing for a few doubtful cases, the comparison with theactual order in the dictionary makes it clear that this distinction was notthe guiding principle for classifying the examples. Although not alwayssatisfactory, an ordering in literal and figurative uses has the advantageof facilitating access to information. A more sophisticated classification


might even take into account that a number of figurative uses of wordsare common in different languages.

Literally Translatable/Not Literally Translatable

Bilingual dictionary compilers have a contrastive knowledge of the twolanguages they are working on; hence, they could use this knowledge tocategorize examples according to some kind of helpful classificationsuch as the examples’ ability to be literally translated. The followinglisting undertakes this classification by comparing each example to itsequivalent in the target language. I considered ‘not literally translatable’those examples that would not be acceptable in Spanish in the case of aword-for-word translation, either because of syntactic intricacies (‘theroad to Teruel/la carretera de Teruel’) or because they would be simplyunintelligible. I draw mainly on Halliday’s definition of metaphor tomake this distinction (Halliday 1994, Chapter 10, throughout).

Literally translatable Not literally translatable

at the 23rd kilometre on the Valenciaroad.the road to success.across the road.she lives across the road from us.by road.to be on the road.my car is on the road again.he’s on the road to recovery.we’re on the road to disaster.the dog was wandering on the road.to be on the right road.to get out of the road.our relationship has reached the end ofthe road.to hold the road

road narrows.road up.the road to Teruel.one for the road.my car is off the road.to be on the road.to get (or take) a show on the road.to take to the road.to take the road.

Fig. 11 Division of the examples according to their translatability.

This list does not seem to have any relation to the original orderingeither. Since learners do not know beforehand if the item that they arelooking for can indeed be literally translated, the literal/figurative dis-tinction is a classification level prior to the literally/not-literally translat-able one. Introducing this classification first would not necessarily speed


up the search, but it would have a pedagogical impact. Yet, the compil-ers of the Collins Spanish did not seem to have this classification inmind.

The Audience

Finally, I looked at the examples for road from the audience’s point ofview, classifying the examples into two categories: those that were usefulfor an English audience, and those that were useful for both English andSpanish audiences. The useful examples for the English speakers wouldbe those that originally caused difficulty. Spanish speakers, however,would immediately understand these same examples. Any Spanishspeaker who understands the English words at, the, 23rd, kilometre, on,and road understands at the 23rd kilometre on the Valencia road. Thisexample is therefore intended for an English speaking audience. Roadup and one for the road, on the other hand, are examples intended for aSpanish and English audience alike. It is useful for Spanish speakinglearners because even if they know what road and up mean this is notsufficient to understand road up. The item has to be translated as awhole. For English speakers, on the other hand, this example is usefulbecause it shows that road up cannot be translated by camino arriba.This kind of classification gives us the following list, which I will discussbelow.English speakers (encoding into Spanish) Examples useful for both

(encoding into Spanish ordecoding from English)

the road to Teruelroad narrowsat the 23rd kilometre on the Valencia roadthe road to successacross the roadshe lives across the road from usby roadmy car is off the roadto be on the roadmy car is on the road againhe’s on the road to recoverywe’re on the road to disasterthe dog was wandering on the roadto be on the right roadto get out of the roadour relationship has reached the end of the road

road upone for the roadto get (or take) a show on theroadto take to the road

Fig. 12 Classification of the road examples according to the audience (English-Spanish side).


What conclusions can be drawn from this list? Again, the examples’ or-der does not coincide with the original list, so the guiding principle wasclearly not the audience. The lexicographers either tried to satisfy bothaudiences simultaneously, or had no specific audience in mind andchose their examples randomly. However, the list of examples intendedfor English speakers is much longer than the one intended for bothEnglish and Spanish speakers. A look at one of the most likely transla-tions for road, camino, makes the degree of this bias crystal clear. Clas-sifying the examples according to this criterion confirms a tendency tofavour the English needs. Since this makes the dictionary more effectivefor these users, it can only be regretted that this tendency was not im-plemented more thoroughly by cutting out the examples useless to them(and that potential Spanish buyers were not informed of this bias on thecover). The next figure classifies the examples for camino in the sameway as the examples for road were classified in the previous figure.

Examples useful for Spanish speakers(encoding into English)

Examples useful for both (encoding intoEnglish and decoding from Spanish)

camino de accesocamino de entradacamino forestalcamino de Santiagocamino de Damascocamino de peajecamino de tierrael camino a seguirel camino de La Pazes el camino del desastreel camino de en mediocamino de Limaen el caminodespués de 3 horas de caminonos quedan 20 kms de caminoes mucho camino¿cuanto camino hay de aquí a San José?por (el) buen camino¿vamos por buen camino?errar el caminotodos los caminos van a Romallevar a uno por mal caminoponerse en camino

camino sin firmecamino francéscamino de herraduracamino de ingresoscamino realcamino de sirgacamino trilladotener el camino trilladocamino vecinalCaminos, Canales y Puertosvamos camino de la muertea medio caminode caminotienen otro niño de caminoestá en camino de desaparecertraer a uno por buen caminoabrirse caminoallanar el caminoechar camino adelanteir por su caminopartir el camino con unoquedarse en el caminocamino de mesa

Fig. 13 Classification of the camino examples according to the audience (English-Spanish side).


The examples which I consider useful for (encoding) Spanishspeakers are those which would offer some difficulty if these users hadto translate them into English. These examples include multi-word itemssuch as camino de acceso, which a Spanish speaker might be drawn totranslate literally, and sentences like después de 3 horas de camino,which cannot be translated as after 3 hours of road.

These same examples are of little use to English speakers. If oneknows what camino, acceso, después and hora means, then the phrasedespués de 3 horas de camino is easy to understand.

Regarding the examples that are useful for both audiences, tienenotro niño de camino will prove difficult for a decoding English speaker,as well as for an encoding Spanish speaker. It is striking that the list ofexamples useful for speakers of both languages is longer on the Spanish-English side of the dictionary, which confirms the bias encountered onthe English-Spanish side.

I will spare the reader more details, but if one compares the Collinsentry to the corresponding entry in the Oxford English-Spanish, one no-tices some evolution. No audience –nor particular activity– has beenchosen to classify the examples, but these have been ordered roughlyinto common uses and fixed expressions16. In practice, this comes downto one subdivision into examples useful for encoding Spanish speakingusers, and another one for both audiences. Unfortunately, this was nottotally carried through. The choice of examples still seems a little for-tuitous and many of the collocates of road which the Cobuild Colloca-tions CD-ROM presents as the most common ones (run down the road,continue down the road, head down the road, walk along the road) havebeen left out.

16 Common uses: is this the road to Boston?; the Cambridge road; five miles down the

road; a factory just down the road (from here); there’s a baker’s over or across theroad; the people from over the road; the house is set back a mile or so from theroadFixed expressions: a major/minor road; a dirt road; it’s good road all the way now;by road; my car’s off the road; to take to the road; road closed; road narrows; tohave one for the road; all roads lead to Rome.


2. The Examples for Road in Oxford-Hachette

The Oxford-Hachette has been acclaimed as one of the most advancedbilingual dictionaries. Its features confirm the upcoming trend of moreencoding-oriented dictionaries, even though its authors do not clearlystate this purpose.

The entry for road lists a large number of examples classified ac-cording to their possible translations in French (mainly rue and voie).This semantic subdivision amounts to the traditional subdivision of lit-eral and figurative since, most of the time, route and rue are used liter-ally, and voie figuratively. Within this first subdivision, there is anothersubdivision according to the preposition required. Finally, three fixedexpressions are listed at the end (any road (up); let’s get this show onthe road!; one for the road). There are a few more examples scatteredover the rest of the entry, but their number is reduced when comparedto the examples abiding by the open-choice principle. This fact, togetherwith the type of classification, characterises the Oxford-Hachette as pre-ponderantly aiming at an encoding audience. Classifying the examplesaccording to a semantic criterion implies that the lexicographers arethinking of users that have an idea of the meaning, which means theyare encoding. This emphasis on encoding is new, particularly in the caseof bilingual dictionaries.

Despite these innovations, however, the classification of examplescontinues to be a problem, even if a number of search-engines includedin the electronic version of the Oxford-Hachette provide an immense im-provement. It is now possible to search for a word that customarily ac-companies the word looked up to get to the idiom. When translatingmettre la main sur quelque chose, the learner can go to the entry formain and search for mettre, which will instantaneously take him to thefixed expression. One can lament, however, that this is not a solution tothe classification problem as the result of a reflection on the needs of theusers and the way these users proceed when using a dictionary. Indeed,in this case the example loses its function of ‘exemplifying’ since it onlyrepresents itself. First, the search facility will not provide an example ifthe morphological form of the search string is not identical with the formin the example – it will not recognise j’ai mis as a form of mettre. Sec-ondly, it certainly will not recognise analogous structures. It will not in-dicate the example avoir une brûlure à la main if the user searches the


examples using an alternative such as blessure, tatouage, etc. The neces-sity for a sensible classification of examples is therefore still deeply felt,even in the age of computerised dictionaries.

Conclusion

Dictionaries are tools, not books for reading. This means they should beas efficient as possible, and a sensible classification of the examples isone way to achieve this. In his famous story on a Chinese encyclopae-dia, Borges17 jokingly shows how a classification is dependent on theclassified information’s intended function. Efficiency implies adjustingmeans to purposes. As I have suggested before, since dictionaries donot separate decoding and encoding, this adjustment is difficult to im-plement.

I could discover no user-oriented logic governing the classificationof examples for road in Collins English-Spanish. They are not groupedaccording to figurative uses, nor according to their possibility for literaltranslation, nor to their usefulness for one audience or another. Theonly order is perhaps an alphabetical one following the prepositions, butthis is not certain. The lack of organisation –caused in turn by a lack ofdefinition of the audience and its needs– has a direct impact on the wayusers can profit from their dictionary.

First, the look-up process is slowed down since the answer to alearner’s question might be found more or less anywhere, and thereforenothing can be skipped. This discourages learners from using a diction-ary altogether.

Secondly, there is no guarantee that users will find what they arelooking for, since no feature has been exploited in full. For an encodingaudience more examples of common usage should be included, whereasfor a decoding audience the list of fixed expressions should be all-inclusive. 17 “In its remote pages it is written that the animals can be classified as: (a) property

of the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) trained, (d) piglets, (e) sirens, (f) mythical, (g)loose dogs, (h) included in this classification, (i) moving restlessly, (j) innumerable,(k) drawn with a very thin camel hair brush, (l) etcetera, (m) that have just brokenthe vase, (n) that from a distance look like flies.” (Borges: 1980, Vol2. 223) (Mytranslation.)


Finally, other possibilities that examples offer, such as giving con-trastive information, are not exploited. In Collins English-Spanish itwould have made sense to contrast examples where road is translated ascamino with examples where road is translated as carretera.

***

Despite all possible criticisms and with all due respect to those who exe-cute the Sisyphean task of compiling dictionaries, the Oxford-Hachette,the Collins-Robert and the Oxford Spanish Dictionary testify to a forwardshift in the conception of dictionaries. It is true that the problem of clas-sification remains intact and will become ever more pressing with the in-creasing use of corpora, capable of supplying an unlimited number ofexamples, and which is becoming a basic tool for language learning andteaching.

The use of authentic language was a radical innovation. As with allinnovations, it had to be defended. Unfortunately, the result was a pre-dictable radicalisation of the Cobuild team and a renewed insistence on‘orthodoxy’: no tampering with real examples! Meanwhile, competitorshave adopted an intermediate position that I think is likely to becomestandard: interrogate the corpus for evidence, and use adapted authen-tic or authentic examples in the dictionary.

The area of examples in learner’s and bilingual dictionaries has stillsome way to go and a few problem areas have been identified. There isa relationship between the choice of examples and the task one assignsto dictionaries for foreign language learners in general. If the emphasisis on decoding, the task is relatively simple. If it is on encoding, it isnecessary to describe what the needs of the encoding learner are. Whenencoders turn to a learner’s dictionary, they are less likely to have aproblem with meaning than with syntax and collocates.

In my experience, this information can best be presented in theform of examples. Until now, either no choice has been made in favourof decoding or encoding, or there is only a patchy awareness of howthese goals can be fulfilled. However, the tools are at hand. Most dic-tionaries now have a corpus and the Cobuild Collocations CD is freelyavailable on the market. The information simply has to be made acces-sible to the learner in a systematic way, and integrated with the otherdictionary elements.


In doing this, care has to be taken to deal with each word as an en-tity, since every word class is characterised by particular difficulties.This is true from the viewpoint of a native speaker, and it is even truerwhen one puts the lexical item in contrast with the learner’s first lan-guage. Some dictionaries such as Cambridge International Dictionary ofEnglish have gone some way in modelling their work according to thefirst language of their audience. It is clear, however, that these are firstattempts and that the research underpinning these projects is still in itsinfancy.

Since English is becoming a most necessary second language with ahigh number of potential dictionary buyers, it is probable that in thenear future more target-conscious encoding dictionaries will be put onthe market with examples chosen accordingly. Whether these exampleswill be authentic or made-up seems to be of less concern than was ini-tially thought. Probably a mixed form of modified authentic exampleswill be the eventual outcome of the authentic vs. made-up debate. How-ever, since electronic dictionaries are most likely to be the future of lexi-cography and space will no longer be a problem, it is reasonable tothink that in the future learners will have at their disposal both made-upand authentic examples integrated into the same tool.

In the next chapter, I will present an approach to dictionary com-pilation which I think introduces some new elements, as a result of myanalysis of existing dictionaries and my own experience as a user.


CHAPTER 4

AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO FOREIGN LANGUAGE

LEXICOGRAPHY

In this chapter I describe what I see as the foreign language dictionaryof the future. Its main feature is a clear separation between encodingand decoding. In what follows I consider the practical consequences ofsuch a distinction.

While I will not go into details about software, I take it for grantedthat the dictionary of the future will be electronic; anyone who useselectronic dictionaries on a regular basis does not need to be persuadedof the advantages which computers offer in this area. Considering thechronic need for space in traditional dictionaries, unlimited storage ca-pacity is the most obvious advantage of a computer, but speed and ran-dom access are equally important. Because of their technical nature Ishall not discuss aspects such as customising possibilities, compilingpersonalised dictionaries, new search features, hyperlinks and others.These will all considerably improve the life of language learners, but Ibelieve they fall outside the scope of my research. What an electronicdictionary allows us to do is to reshuffle the information in a dictionaryin such a way that it is presented to the learner in different ways ac-cording to what the activity is, decoding or encoding.

Thus, as the reader will notice, many of the problems and currentpossibilities of separating the two dictionary functions (encoding and de-


coding) are respectively solved and wide-open with electronic dictionar-ies. It is no coincidence that both a new proposal and the means to im-plement it emerge at the same time. In spite of this, what I put forwardis not dictated by what computers can do, but is based on an analysis oflearners’ needs. Computers just happen to meet these needs better.

Since I am not proposing a different kind of definition, nor differentkinds of translational equivalents, the reader will notice that this newdictionary does not presuppose a large amount of work at the micro-structural level. I basically propose to break up in parts much of whathas been achieved all along the history of lexicography and restructurethis material. An important part of this work is related to defining theorder in which a search is carried out and what kind of tools arenecessary to make this search successful, even though one of the maincharacteristics of computers used for reference works is allowing a userrandom access to the information.

Encoding vs. decodingAsking for separate encoding and decoding dictionaries is basically ask-ing that the encoding parts of dictionaries be emancipated from the de-coding tool that current dictionaries still basically are. As I suggested inprevious chapters, often the encoding information is present in the dic-tionary, but is submerged by decoding information, hampering the look-up process. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the more diction-aries attempt to meet encoders’ needs, the more they burden the decod-ers with unnecessary information. The first request for a different set ofdictionaries for decoding and encoding dates back to the 1930s, whenLev Sjtsjerba:

launched the idea that two types of dictionaries have to be compiled – onetype for users who translate from a foreign language into their mother tongue,and the other for users who translate from their mother tongue into a foreignlanguage. Therefore, according to Sjtsjerba, for a particular pair of languagesit was necessary to have four dictionaries: A!B and B!A for users with themother tongue A, and A!B and B!A for users with the mother tongue B.(Berkov, 1996:547)

This idea of ‘Deux langues, quatre dictionnaires’ (Bogaards, 1990)was afterwards periodically repeated by a number of researchers, with-out any practical consequence. It is rather easy to think of a few com-mercial reasons why Sjtsjerba’s proposal was never put into practice. On

AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEXICOGRAPHY 99

the other hand, it should be noted that Sjtsjerba’s proposal is a typicalencoding user’s demand and that when he made it dictionaries were stillpredominantly used for decoding. In 1983, Cowie outlined the problemas follows:

Some foreign learners may be more concerned with interpretation than pro-duction – they may use the dictionary primarily for quick retrieval of individ-ual items or meanings when reading – but no general dictionary for the ad-vanced student can afford to neglect one need in favour of the other. (Cowie,1983:136)

The essence of the problem had by then long been understood.Apparently, however, it seems like there would still be no majority in fa-vour of a change.

I wish to suggest as a general principle that the interpretative function placesa high premium on ease of access and thus on the strict alphabetical orderingof entries. The productive function, on the other hand, places a high premiumon the clustering of derivatives, compounds, idioms, phrasal verbs, and so onaround the simple lexemes (or particular meanings of those lexemes to whichthey are related). (Cowie, Ibid.: 141)

But however obvious these claims for separating encoding and de-coding seemed to many, to others they seemed to amount to a rathersuperfluous demand. In 1983, Zgusta was not convinced of the neces-sity of separating encoding and decoding:

The reason for this overlapping (of decoding and encoding dictionaries) isclear: the statistically ‘normal user’ does not wish to buy several dictionariesof the same language, and therefore many dictionaries are designed to servemore than one purpose. Observably, one of the purposes taken care of insuch a multi-purpose dictionary usually enjoys a degree of preference; nev-ertheless, the chance of being useful to more sets of users and therefore ap-pealing to a broader public (i.e. more buyers) proves to be attractive to manyeditors and to most publishers. (Zgusta, 1983)

Of course, Zgusta wrote this 20 years ago, when the separation ofdecoding and encoding dictionaries would mean an enormous pile ofpaper. The prospect of having to print four dictionaries in the place ofone could not have appealed to most commercial publishers. Appar-ently, it was not the time for dramatic changes in dictionary conception.But with the advent of the computer era needs changed, and so did themeans to meet them.


As a language learner and teacher, I am personally convinced thatthe main transformation dictionaries have to undergo is the separation ofencoding and decoding. Today, of course, the information needed tocompile a decoding dictionary can be put to use in an encoding diction-ary and both can be part of one and the same electronic dictionary.

In what follows, I will deal with the decoding and the encoding partof the dictionary separately, in the same sequence that learners followwhen they look up a word. Since an electronic dictionary can be ran-domly accessible, this sequence is not a necessary ingredient of the dic-tionary I propose. It would only be a path for users if they so wished.

As the reader will observe, the part of the section dealing with de-coding is much shorter than the part dealing with encoding. As I madeclear before, I consider decoding to be a lesser problem than encoding.

1. DECODING

Decoding can be understood in two ways: decoding to understand anddecoding to translate. The latter usually implies the former, even if thereare cases, such as simultaneous translation, in which translators trans-late the words of a message which they themselves often don't under-stand. But these are clearly exceptions. One usually wishes first to un-derstand to be able to translate. In both cases one goes from a languagethat one knows less well to a language that one knows better. Thismeans, in most cases, going from a foreign language to the mothertongue.

In the first case, a dictionary user is reading a text, or looking up aword she or he heard, merely in order to understand a message. Thissituation will by far be the most common one and corresponds to theprimary task of a dictionary.

Translation, on the other hand, involves a process of encodingwhich follows the process of decoding. It is as much because of this en-coding part, as of the decoding part, that translation gave rise to a sepa-rate discipline of ‘translation studies’ with its linguistic as well as broadcultural and literary considerations. A number of distinguished authors18

18 Jakobson, 1959; Mounin, 1963; Catford, 1965; Steiner, 1971; Basnett-McGuire,

1991


make it clear that translation is a complex process, so complex that someauthors have come to the conclusion that it is virtually impossible. How-ever, as Mounin sharply states:

Si l’on accepte les thèses courantes sur la structure des lexiques, desmorphologies et des syntaxes, on aboutit à professer que la traduction devraitêtre impossible. Mais les traducteurs existent, ils produisent, on se sertutilement de leurs productions. On pourrait presque dire que la traductionconstitue le scandale de la linguistique contemporaine. (Mounin, 1963:8)

It seems to me that native speaker’s dictionaries should tackle thedemands translation places on dictionaries in the decoding and subse-quent encoding sense of the word. Even if in the future nothing preventselaborate native speaker’s synonym dictionaries and thesauruses frombeing included on a CD-ROM together with a foreign language diction-ary, thus merging native speaker’s and foreign language lexicography.

Decoding is at any rate easier than encoding. Particularly for ad-vanced learners, most of the existing reference tools will be adequate,even if open to improvement. This does not mean decoding is easy, butit is on the whole a smoother process than encoding because the learnerusually has more resources in the language she or he knows best.

Decoding always consists of some form of translation, be it interlin-gual or intralingual (Jakobson, 1959), and can be assisted by either abilingual or monolingual dictionary.

Advanced learners in particular can choose between a bilingual,native speaker’s, synonym, learner’s, or bilingualised dictionary, at leastfor a few languages. As a number of surveys show (Tomaszczyk, 1979;Baxter, 1980; Bensoussan et al., 1984) and common sense dictates, bi-lingual dictionaries are in most cases the obvious choice. If advancedlearners often prefer a monolingual reference work, this is probably be-cause current monolingual dictionaries still cover a broader area of thelexis than bilingual dictionaries. This does not necessarily mean that anintralingual translation is better than an interlingual one. But whateverkind of dictionary advanced learners prefer, the existing tools are usu-ally sufficient. Even when the dictionary lists more than one translationor definition for a word, its context can guide the learner.

Beginning learners, on the other hand, cannot but use bilingualdictionaries and I analyse their problems with this limitation in mind. In


figure 14 I list different kinds of items beginners may have troublelooking up in a dictionary.

Example Type

1. found/findtabemasu/taberu (to eat in Japanese)omoshirokunai/omoshiroi (not funny/funny, in Japanese)jemandem/jemand (someone, dative and nominative in German)

morphologi-cal problem

2. road blockswimming bathswimming poolswimming costume

multi-worditem

4. at first glanceat great lengthin zeven haasten (in a hurry, in Dutch)de uma cajadada só (to kill two birds with one stone, in Portuguese)

fixed ex-pression

5. wie laatst lacht best lacht (he who laughs last laughs longest, inDutch)muita esmola o santo desconfia (too much effort makes one suspi-cious, in Portuguese)

proverb

3. in aanmerking komen voor (qualify for, in Dutch)dar uma esperadinha (to wait, in Portuguese)

idiom

6. leadbreak

polysemy

Fig. 14 Decoding problems of beginning learners.

Assuming that the information which learners are looking for existsin the dictionary, their failure to retrieve it can be traced back to threeproblems. The first one occurs when the dictionary form is differentfrom the looked-up form. The second, when the word is part of a multi-word item not recognised as such. The third, in the case of polysemy. Iwill now deal with each of these problems separately. I will tackle theissue of different word forms and multi-word items together in one sec-tion.


1. Morphology and Multi-Word Items

The easiest problem to solve is that of learners unable to find the rightentry because they do not know the dictionary form of the item whichthey are looking for. In this case, all that is needed is to include allforms in the dictionary, as is already a common practice in a number ofEnglish paper dictionaries for foreigners, at least for verbs, and in a fewelectronic dictionaries where this feature is easier to implement. Whenusers type fiz in the Brazilian Aurélio Eletrônico XXI, they are automati-cally referred to fazer, and so on. This may not be possible for all typesof languages, but it is for all those with which I am familiar, including anagglutinating one like Japanese. Including all word forms may result inlarge lists, but this is not a problem for electronic dictionaries. What hasto be included depends on what the morphological modifications of eachlanguage are.

The problem of multi-word items is harder to tackle. However, inthe case of long recognised multi-word items such as swimming bath,swimming pool, swimming costume, and the like, the solution is relativelysimple. In an electronic dictionary, looking up swimming, bath, pool orcostume should lead the learner to all possible combinations. Electronicdictionaries’ ability to present the information on successive screensprevents the user from feeling overwhelmed and put off by the sheer ex-cess of information. When looking up swimming, the words bath, pooland costume could pop up and would trigger a reaction from the learn-ers if the same word(s) were part of their context. For instance, learnerslooking up levée who are unaware that levée de terre was a single item,should be confronted with terre, which will automatically draw their at-tention to the multi-word item.

Secondly, fixed expressions can be considered multi-word items atthe same level as proverbs. At first glance, at great length, in zeven haas-ten and de uma cajadada só do not allow any variation in their sequenceand function as single words. In a traditional dictionary, users had tolook up these items under one of the expression’s words. Because oflack of space they were not included under all of the entries involved.Since some of these entries would end up being very long, there was al-ways a danger that the learner would miss the item. In an electronicdictionary, a fixed expression does not have to be classified anywhere inparticular and it is possible to access it through any of its component


words. This has already been implemented in the Cobuild Dictionary onCD-ROM and other electronic dictionaries such as Euroglot. Again, theinformation is not presented to the learner all at once, but on successivescreens.

2. Idioms and Collocations

Sinclair defines idioms as ‘semi-preconstructed phrases that constitutesingle choices, even though they might appear to be analysable intosegments.’ (Sinclair 1991:110) Under this heading, Sinclair classifies anumber of items which, for lexicographic reasons, I prefer to categoriseinto two groups.

The first group consists of rigid constructs which I consider multi-word items. In of course, a Sinclair example, two words are intimatelylinked forming virtually a single lexical item translated by one word inmany languages (claro, natuurlijk, natürlich), and in two words (biensûr) in others. These fall under the previous heading.

The second kind of idioms is the one Sinclair exemplifies throughphrases such as set one’s eyes on and it’s not in his nature to. These idi-oms allow for lexical, syntactical and word order variation, making themmuch harder for a dictionary to handle (Sinclair 1991:112, 113). Yetdictionaries should deal with them. Indeed, for most idioms a word-for-word translation does not make any sense, although it depends on thetarget language. But even in Dutch, a language closely related to Eng-lish, a word-for-word translation of make up your mind, maak op uw ver-stand, will lead only very clever Dutch speakers to understand this asbeslissen. In French, the literal translation is total gibberish (fais sur tonesprit), just as in Portuguese (faz sobre tua mente).

Dictionary compilers have been aware of an “idiom problem,” yetnot all idioms are recognised as such. Several are commonly listed in anentry under one form or another, but others, such as it’s not in his na-ture to, have never been identified as idioms. The fact that even nativespeakers are often not aware of the fixedness of these chunks of wordsand their changeable nature makes it difficult to solve this problem in adictionary. In addition, the challenge for the lexicographer is not somuch to translate these idioms as to make learners aware of the fact thatthey are dealing with an idiom and that their quest for understanding


will be useless if they limit themselves to translating each word sepa-rately.

In the case of rigid constructs such as of course or de graça or porsupuesto a dictionary should simply place all possible idioms of which aword can take part before the learner’s eyes. A search for course, graça,supuesto could lead to a screen where all the possibilities are listed anda click on these items would yield a translation. In the case of less evi-dent idioms, the dictionary should allow users to input all the words theysuspect form one unit: ‘up, mind, take,’ ‘towel, throw.’ These are rathersimple solutions, but I have never seen them put into practice.

The main reason why this problem is nevertheless difficult to solvein traditional dictionaries is that these dictionaries must necessarilychoose a single classification order, which makes cross-referencing diffi-cult. In a traditional dictionary, idioms can be classified either undertheir first word; under the word which is considered most important; oraccording to the semantic field. Not all of these orders can be used atthe same time. Thus traditional dictionaries often have the right infor-mation, but they have limited ways of making it accessible.

Since an idiom is a mutable construction, it is a challenge for lexi-cographers to pin it down. With make up your mind the morphologicalvariations of the verb and the possessive pronoun, the variations in wordorder, plus the intercalation of other optional items which can result inphrases like ‘make your own mind up,’ are all possible. However, a cor-pus allows for making a list of all possible variations – an otherwise dif-ficult task. This presupposes there is a list of all possible idioms and, ac-cording to Sinclair, this project is under way, at least in English.

One way of making idiom decoding easier is to draw the attention ofthe dictionary user to the most frequent combinations in which a wordcan appear. Even for highly frequent words such as take this is quicklydone with the help of a simple tool such as the Cobuild Collocations CD-ROM:

part in; (take) place; (take) off; (take) legal action; (take) care of; (take) more than;(take) some time; (take) some kind of; (take) advantage of; (take) full advantage of;(take) a (very) long time; (take) (too) long; (take) any chances; (take) a (quick, hard,detailed, fresh, long, hard) look; (take) account of; (take) into account; (take) years,months, weeks, days.Fig. 15 Collocates of take on the Cobuild Collocations CD-ROM.


This list is probably incomplete because of possible flaws in theconstruction of the corpus, failure to recognise mechanically the mor-phological variations of the idiom, or simply limitations of the CD-ROMas a medium. Even so, it is a start and it makes looking up the collocateseasy. Surprisingly, I do not know of any dictionary where this has beensystematically undertaken, not even in dictionaries which profess towork with a corpus. Undoubtedly the listing of all possible idioms wouldtake up much space in a paper dictionary, but not on a CD-ROM. Inaddition, the same information could be used in several different placesat once. Taking advantage of the sequencing possibilities of the com-puter, looking up take would bring up other possible collocates: part;place; off; legal action; care of; time; kind; advantage; long; chances;look; account; years; months; weeks; days. When looking up part, takewould also be one of the possible directions in which to proceed, to-gether with time; most; play; any; important; because; large; life; world;first; also; become; country; work. Even ignoring the fact that the wordthey look up is part of a larger item, a glance at the possible collocateswould quickly make learners aware of the fact that it is19.

To speed up decoding, a dictionary should rank the likelihood of agiven word combination. In the case of place, the most likely combina-tion is take. If a word can form idioms, there is a fair chance it will formmore than one and in this list of combinations one collocate will be morefrequent than another one. The current programmes designed forsearching a corpus automatically detect this sequence. It should be easyto take advantage of this capability.

3. Polysemy

Words can be polysemous within a language itself, or only when lookedat from the point of view of a foreign language. In the first case, which Iwould call internal polysemy and in which the various senses of the wordwill frequently be metonymically related to each other, a word refers totwo or more different entities (hammer as a tool; as a part of a gun; as adevice on a piano).

The second kind of polysemy, which I will refer to as external

19 This is exactly what has been implemented in the 1998 Collins Cobuild Edict,

produced after the bulk of this book was finished.


polysemy, only appears in translation. The average language user isunaware of it. Native speakers of French do not normally know thatquelque chose can be understood in two different ways, reason why itcan be translated in English by anything or something. Another exampleis esperar in Portuguese, which can be translated by expect, hope, orwait.

It is the first kind of polysemy which is troublesome for decoding,whereas the second kind is a problem for encoding. For foreign learn-ers, most words are polysemous, since high-frequency words –particu-larly verbs– have easily more than one possible translation. When look-ing up a word in a bilingual dictionary, the user will frequently find thatmore than one translational equivalent is suggested. This is, mutatis mu-tandis, also true for definitions in a monolingual dictionary.

Cases of polysemy are elucidated by taking into account the con-text. Choosing between the various meanings of a word will be easy foradvanced learners, since they understand the context from which theyretrieved the word. It is more difficult for beginning learners. A solution,therefore, would be to amplify a ‘word’ to some sort of larger lexicalitem containing the context of whatever nature this context may be. Thisis what a dictionary should endeavour to do. I will explain this now inmore detail.

Lead

The Random House Webster’s College Dictionary lists 62 differentmeanings for lead. A number of them mean roughly the same, but quitea few have different translations, depending on the language. Accordingto my calculations, there are at least 30 different translations for leadeach Spanish, Portuguese, and French (for instance in Spanish: plomo;balazos; sonda; escandallo; excusas para no trabajar; mina; lápiz; em-plomado; cabeza; primer lugar; ejemplo; iniciativa; pista; correa; traílla;cable; papel principal; protagonista; solista; principal; artículo principal;introducción; mano; llevar; guiar; conducir; etc.) The right translationdepends in some cases on the immediate context of lead, in others on itsbroader context, in still others on whether lead is a verb or a noun.

The procedure for describing a word in terms of context –how tobuild up a lexical item by broadening the boundaries of a word– isclosely related to that of looking up a word in a corpus. When one


knows how to look up a specific meaning of a polysemous word in acorpus, one has described it as a lexical item. If I know the specificcharacteristics of a word I have to mention in order to retrieve onlythose instances in which it has a meaning X, and not Y, I know every-thing that is necessary to disambiguate it.

However, current programs for analysing a corpus, such as Look-Up at Cobuild, are only partially satisfactory since they limit searches toa nine-word span. They are not able, for obvious reasons, to pick outthe pertinent words from the rest of the text which, in some cases, de-termine its meaning. Words which determine the sense of a polysemousword may not be syntactically related to it. If one takes the case of leadand parses it out by translating it into Portuguese, one comes to the fol-lowing figure:

If lead occurs together or in the context of: Translate it as:

I, you, she, he, we, they lead liderar, enca-beçar

I, you, she, he, we, they lead + life levar uma vidalead + to levarlead + noun (story, singer, etc.) principallead + swing inventar descul-

pasof lead (but not followed by a noun: story, singer,etc.)

de chumbo

‘s lead (but not followed by a noun: story, singer,etc.)

liderança

to lead guiarwill lead levará/levarãowould lead levariapoint lead vantagem[auxiliar] + lead levarthe lead a liderançalead +[química] [exploração de minas] chumbolead + [cachorros] corrente

Fig. 16 Translations of lead according to co-text and context.

The figure above gives an overview of how lead is translated intoPortuguese, depending on the co-text and the context. It is a partial de-scription which demonstrates that describing the whole lexis of a lan-guage in this way is a huge task. It might, however, be worthwhile. This


figure shows how easy it is to help a beginning learner determine themeaning of a word by means of another word or an indication of thegeneral topic of the text. This might seem a bit laborious to an advancedspeaker, but beginning learners are more willing to put some effort intotheir search since they cannot cheerfully skip words and continue to un-derstand the text.

When looking at a corpus it is astonishing which elements, and howfew elements, characterise a specific meaning of a word. These ele-ments, unfortunately, do not necessarily belong to a neat ‘nine-wordspan.’ In the case of lead and unless lead is followed by a noun, allcombinations with ‘s automatically rule out any other translation if notliderança. Similarly, the presence of of indicates the cases in which leadmeans chumbo20. This is also the correct translation if the topic of thetext is mines or chemistry or a related area. This analysis of lead, whichshould of course have a more user-friendly aspect in an electronic dic-tionary, deals with the question in a pragmatic and not in a scholarlyway. Hence the motley aspect of the figure. The purpose is to help thelearner by any possible means. The way in which the data are presentedhere is not the way in which they should appear on a screen. The inten-tion is only to give an example of how a polysemous lexical item can bedisambiguated by adding succinct pieces of information, possibly of verydifferent kinds: syntactic, semantic, morphological. It is indeed a mix-ture of formal information (co-text), meaning information (context) andgrammatical information (e. g. ‘auxiliary’).

A possible way of presenting this information is in the form of agrid, comparable to the ‘picture’ of a word in a programme such as Co-build‘s Look-Up. Users would click on any word in the grid which theywould recognise from their context and the translation would pop up. Itcould be something like the following figure.

20 Looking at it from another angle, of lead and ‘s lead can be considered multi-word

items just like, e.g., railway-track or road block.


Would lead tothe singerpoint storywillwould

into

‘sauxiliarypersonal pro-noun

exploração de mi-nas

música jornalis-mo

políti-ca

química cachorrosFig. 17 Example grid of the entry lead in an electronic dictionary.

Break

The case of break is slightly different from lead. Break is even morepolysemous than lead. It is also more devoid of meaning, which meansits sense is less dependent on the context and almost exclusively on theco-text. Apart from more traditional types of co-text such as prepositionsor objects in the case of break as a verb, less expected words like cameindicate in what sense break is being used. The grid below is only an in-dication of what an entry could look like and is by no means compre-hensive. A great number of occurrences of break, in all its forms, shouldbe translated into the target language and in each case it should be es-tablished what words determine a particular translation.

break descanso(substantivo) ouquebrar (verbo)

a/the descanso, pausatake a descansar, fazer

uma pausaFrom interromper para

descansar + into +carhousehomebuilding

Assaltar


+ away Desprender-se,libertar-se

big + Grandeoportunidade

+ bones Quebrar + off Separar-se,

desistir,interromper+ diplomaticrelationsnegotiationsdialogue

cortar

+ out Rebentar, brotar+ fightingdisturbancesepidemicfightsconflictwarrow

começar

+ free Libertar-se+ from libertar-se de+ of libertar-se de

+ glass Quebrar + up partir-se,

dissolver-se+ marriage fracassar+ protestsdemonstrations

dissolver

we, they + separar-se+ with separar-se

dethe break-up of dissolução

+ came oportunidade + ranks sair de forma + record quebrar um

recorde + even sair sem perder ou

ganhar + rules violar as regras + law violar a lei

Fig. 18 Example grid of the entry break in an electronic dictionary.

The grid above is based greatly on an analysis of the ‘collocationstree’ of break as taken from the Bank of English. The original colloca-tions tree looks like this:


Collocate Frequency of collocates in 1000sentences in which break occurs

Statistical significance of the collocate(over 2 is significant)

down 91 8.823179up 71 6.322514out 67 6.189736after 43 4.810485record 22 4.364512into 38 4.231458a 239 4.157161in 201 3.959329his 66 3.914527rules 16 3.815851when 41 3.701246silence 14 3.652114the 525 3.641007off 24 3.573706had 50 3.177460away 16 3.145142leg 10 3.025647tax 12 3.003254through 19 2.990364free 13 2.977855marriage 10 2.956224lunch 9 2.845882war 14 2.813841before 19 2.808706bones 8 2.769681glass 8 2.603870over 23 2.587004law 10 2.583217during 12 2.485047big 11 2.396905talks 8 2.381263try 9 2.379298tie 6 2.331762since 12 2.259616laws 6 2.250825taboo 5 2.222910deadlock 5 2.217709trying 8 2.180300taking 8 2.177877ranks 5 2.158782news 9 2.151499heart 7 2.125252fighting 6 2.122338diplomatic 5 2.094875ago 9 2.087023

Fig. 19 Collocation tree for break.


Clearly, a number of these collocates have to be eliminated sincethey do not influence the translation of break. Words like during, since,before or ago show that break is often used with an indication of time,but this is not enough to know what break means in these cases. The be-haviour of most polysemous words should be carefully studied, and it isnot sufficient to include the words which appear in the collocations fre-quency chart. Indeed, some words which co-occur with high frequencypolysemous words are themselves not extremely frequent and do noteven appear in the collocations chart. But when these words appearwithin a nine-word span of the polysemous word, they determine themeaning. This is the case of came, which does not feature in the list ofmost frequent collocations for break, but when it appears in conjunctionwith break, it most likely means opportunity: “But the break for South-ampton came in the 74th minute when Le Tissier sent former Arsenal re-serve Neil Heaney off through the middle.”

I realise that presenting the hypertext reality of a computer screenin two dimensions demands a lot from the reader’s imagination. In theeventual dictionary, the columns in the grid of figure 17 and 18 shouldbe displayed in separate windows or in boxes popping up at the click ofa mouse. Users would also personalise the grid’s appearance. Apartfrom a translation, users would have the possibility of calling up a defi-nition in the target language or a set of examples. However, in the caseof decoding this would probably not be necessary. In the grid above it isunderstood that decoders can stop their search whenever they think theyhave sufficient information. Typing in break would give the user quebrarand descanso. If this did not make sense, users could click on one of thewords which they recognise in the context, e.g., off. If still not satisfiedwith the translation, users could go on clicking on other words whichwould be part of their text and end up finding começar. As can be no-ticed for break, the translation of the word does not depend on thebroader context, but only on the co-text. The translation of very polyse-mous words tends to depend on the words found in the traditional nine-word span. Decoders do not know what are the words that change thecore meaning of the hard word, and these must be suggested to them.Learners should not have to enter more words beyond the word they arelooking up. They should be prompted to look for suggested words in thesurroundings of their hard word if the core translation does not makesense.


The users themselves would decide on how much of all this wouldbe visible on the first screen. They might find it more practical to havejust the prompting words or concepts first and the mouse to click onthem. Some users would prefer to see the whole picture, others to pro-ceed gradually.

4. Including the Context: Two Experiments.

The task of the decoding dictionary is to give users the right meaning ofa hard word by whatever means, and as quickly as possible. In the pre-ceding section, I concentrated on the co-text. In the case of some words,nevertheless, the meaning of a word depends on the broader context.The translation of hammer can be deduced from its co-text in somecases, but it may be easier to proceed via the context: martelo if the textis on metallurgy, percussor if on guns, martelo again if on pianos. If thedictionary could establish what the general context of the hard word is,it would be able to immediately suggest to the user the most probabletranslation. Looking up the meaning of a word in a dictionary would begreatly facilitated if the search area were not usually so broad. As thingsstand now, one starts from a book which contains a fair part of thewhole lexis of a language to find one single word. But one can eithermake the pond smaller or the fish bigger. What follows is an account oftwo experiments aiming at trying to make the fish look bigger.

First experiment

In the first experiment, I asked a group of English students learningSpanish to read a number of short newspaper articles from the Catalannewspaper El Mundo. Their task was not to point out all the words thatwere hard to understand, but only those which they would look up in anormal reading situation, in which they wanted to understand the mes-sage. The articles were on different subjects, ranging from internationalpolitics to computing. In addition, one student took on the first Chapterof Don Quixote. This gave a number of lists for every article with thewords the students thought they would need to look up.

When I realised that these lists contained the stories’ new informa-tion, I was rather pleasantly surprised. Had the students failed to lookup these words, they would certainly have understood what the topicwas, but not what was newsworthy. In other words, the hard words justi-


fied why an author had written on the subject. The easy words carriedthe information generally known on the subject. A telling example of thisis the following list which shows the hard words in an article ofapproximately 180 words on the increasing number of computer thefts(‘El robo de ordenadores portátiles aumentó de forma significativa.’) Inthe right-hand column, I tried to imagine what questions the hard wordswere an answer to.

Hard word Question (it is an answer to…)

Ordenadores (3 times) What is being stolen?datos (de las compañías de seguros) Where does the information come

from?Alrededor (de 208.000 ordenadoresrobados)

How many?

Fundas y bolsas How do the thieves go about it?Suelendueño (del ordenador) How do the thieves go about it?pertenencias What is being stolen?piezas metálicas How do the thieves go about it?se apodera (el ladrón) How do the thieves go about it?formar cola (en la línea del detector) How do the thieves go about it?sustraído (por el ladrón) How do the thieves go about it?funda How do the thieves go about?Fig. 20 Unknown words in: ‘El robo de ordenadores portátiles aumentó de formasignificativa.’

As can be deduced from this figure, most of the unknown wordsare an answer to the question ‘How do thieves go about stealing a com-puter?’ This is the newsworthy part of the article, and not so much thefact that robberies are increasing, which is something everybody wouldexpect. Seven of the twelve unknown words are directly related to thistopic. This means that, allowing for some information obtained by in-duction from the context, this part of the article would be largely missedout by learners without access to a dictionary.

In the case of the learner who took on the first chapter of Don Qui-xote (1900 words), the unknown words (app. 2.5 % of the entire text)are like a summary of the chapter and indeed of the book as a whole.Without them, the story is devoid of interest. This is the list of wordswhich the student who read the first chapter would have looked up.


Hard word What it refers to

astillero knighthoodadarga knighthoodrocín knighthoodgalgo corredor knighthoodolla habits of Don Quixotevaca habits of Don Quixotecarnero habits of Don Quixotesalpicón habits of Don Quixotequebrantos habits of Don Quixotelentejas habits of Don Quixotepalomino de añadidura habits of Don Quixotevelarte habits of Don Quixotevellorí habits of Don Quixoteama who lives with Don Quixotefrisaba appearance of Don Quixoterecta appearance of Don Quixoteenjuto de rostro appearance of Don Quixotedesatino knighthoodrequiebros knighthooddesafío knighthoodfermosura knighthooddesvelábase lack of sleepheridas knighthoodrostro appearancedarle fin al pie de la letra booksmelindroso knighthoodno le iba en zaga knighthoodturbio lack of sleep which typifies Don Qui-

xotependencias knighthoodOTHERS: acabar; ensillaba; podadera;ratos; enflaquece; sacara; inacabable,competencia, muy acomodada situación.Fig. 21 Words experienced as hard by the test subject in the first chapter of Don Qui-xote.

Basically this first chapter is about who Don Quixote is, what helooks like, what his habits are, who he lives with and his obsession withbooks and knighthood. Some of the unknown words in this list are


clearly not ascribable to any special feature of Quixote, but the nicething is that so many are. There are maybe no four words that charac-terise Don Quixote better than pendencias (fights), desafíos (challenges),heridas (wounds) and requiebros (flatteries addressed to women), all onthe hard word list. These words are extremely frequent in Quixote, butare relatively rare in the language in general. Unfortunately I do nothave any 17th century Spanish corpus to confirm this.

The conclusions to be drawn from this experiment are, first, thatthe difficult words of a text are responsible for the important part of itscontent. Second, that since the hard words are the less frequent ones,taking out the more frequent words leaves us with a summary of thetext. This may seem obvious, since otherwise there would be a limitednumber of texts, but it is something dictionary design could take into ac-count. If the topic of a text resides in the less frequent words in the lexisof a language as a whole, the learner’s look-ups shed light on this topic.This means that in the case of polysemous words, electronic dictionariescould guide learners more directly to the meaning of the word if theyhad at least a rough idea of what the text was about. In the case of apolysemous word such as drive, it is unlikely that the meaning should beanything else but dirigir/unten suru/besturen/lenken/manejar/conduire ifthe text is on cars. Consequently, the learner need not know what hedrives me mad means, unless the author of the text wanted to make apun.

This can also be illustrated by the word key. Key can be translatedin French by clé; remontoir; clavette; touche; secret; légende; liste; solu-tions; corrigé; tonalité; capital; essentiel (Oxford-Hachette). Depending onthe situation, a learner will retrieve the right translation by means of acollocation –e.g. if key is followed by issue, preceded by master, house,car– , or a morphological feature since there is a fair chance that theplural keys refers to clefs. However, the topic of the text might lend ahand as well. If the text is on music, key should be understood as to-nalité, if on clocks as remontoir, if on language textbooks as corrigé. Alabel could solve this problem, but what if the reader has only a vagueidea of the topic of the text, or if the label is not easy to tell? In thiscase, the list of hard words would give the (electronic) dictionary an ideaof what the topic is and lead the learner to the right translation of apolysemous word.


Second experiment

To check this hypothesis on frequent and infrequent words, I took a se-ries of articles published in the American Herald Tribune and filteredout the words included in a list of the 600 most frequent English words,according to the Bank of English. This left me with skeletons of the arti-cles which still had enough function words to be roughly understand-able. I reached the number of 600 words empirically. Leaving out morethan 600 the text became incomprehensible.

The experiment with the Herald Tribune confirmed my hypothesisthat the information of a text lies in its infrequent words which are, infact, very frequent within the text itself. I will limit myself to one exam-ple, an article on the operation Desert Storm. In the figure below, I listthe words retained after taking out the words that are amongst the 600most frequent words in English. The original article consisted of 846words, the sifted one of 585. (Including repetitions.)

Smart Arms In Gulf War Are Found Overrated

Pentagon’s Reliance On High-Tech War Questioned in Review

Gulf/Pentagon dramatically oversold/effectiveness/expensive -techaircraft/missiles/thorough independent study/date /Pentagon/principal contractors claims/precision/impressive/weapons -/Stealth fighterjet/Tomahawk land-attack missile/laser-guided ''smart bombs''/overstatedmisleading inconsistent/data/unverifiable/study/non-partisan Accounting /accounting concluded/costly ''smart'' weapons systems/necessarilyperform/Gulf/fashioned cheaper ''dumb'' ones/wisdom/plans/dependincreasingly/weapons/extend/art/tens/billions/dollars/accounting analysesprograms/Congress/secret -/study/conducted Operation Desert Storm/detailedanalysis/million pieces/: Defence Department databases compiled/commandersintelligence/analyses/contractors/accounting/interviewed/100 Desert Storm pilotsplanners/battlefield commanders /unclassified summary/250-page secret/scheduled/published//commissioned/1992/Senator David Pryor Democrat/Arkansas/Representative JohnDingell Democrat/Michigan/Congress decide/weapons/buy /secret contains facts/figures/buttress/13-page unclassified summary/officialfamiliar/lying /Pentagon briefers treated/videotapes showing/smart bombdiving/shaft/Baghdad/anecdotes/extraordinary accuracy/Tomahawk missileslaunched/afar/study concluded/stories/true/truth /


Pentagon/dispute/conclusions/April 28 letter/accounting/DefenceDepartment/acknowledges/shortcomings/ precision-guided munitions/aircraft/carry/Tomahawk missiles/department/ability/assess/effectiveness/bombing campaign/Gulf/shortcomings/improved smart weapons studyingwhether/mix/weaponry/arsenal/proposing/ways/locate/destroy targets /overwhelmed/Iraqi/1991 Gulf/deployed nearly 1000 combat aircraft/unleashednearly/tons/bombs/dropped/Gery/Japan daily/superior technology pilots/whether/presumedtarget/tank/truck/whether/destroyed/sensors - laser electro-optical/infraredsystems/clearly clouds rain fog smoke/humidity/sleek F-117 Stealth fighter jet/highly touted ability/target evadingdetection/necessarily outperform older cheaper aircraftclaimed/80 percent success/bombing runs/Stealth fighter/reality/closer/40 percent /inappropriate aircraft perforce/effectiveness demonstrated/DesertStorm/characterise higher- aircraft/generally/capable/lower- aircraft/ summary /Nor smart bombs necessarily deliver bang/buck/summary /8 percent/bomb tonnage dropped/Iraq/smart bombs/guidedmunitions/accounted/84 percent/munitions/summary/campaign data/validate/purported efficiency/effectiveness/guided munitionsqualification/summary/-target/-bomb' efficiency/achievedsmart bombs built/Pentagon/planned/estimated/$58/triple/spend/FBI/drugsimmigration customs federal courts/prison construction /guided munitions/ summary concluded/limitations/effectivenessdemonstrated/Desert Storm/addressed/Department/Defence /praise/Pentagon weaponry/flush/victory/Gulf/questioned/1991 George Bush/Patriotmissile/nearly perfect shooting 41/42 Iraqi missiles aimed/Israel/Saudi Arabia /Defence/Patriot/perfect knocking/40 percent/Scuds aimed/Israel/70percent/aimed/Saudi Arabia /Fig. 22 Least frequent words in Herald Tribune article on Desert Storm.

This experiment supports the hypothesis that a text’s new informa-tion lies in its less frequent words. It also suggests, as is natural, that thisnew information does not lie in the function words, all included in thelist of the 600 most frequent words21. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that 21 Literature teachers may claim that very important information lies enclosed in

these function words and in the way they are combined, and even in a newspaperarticle these very frequent words inform us about a possible hidden agenda. But inthis case we are dealing with problems which precede these considerations. Un-doubtedly, very frequent words are the first thing one learns in a foreign language,then come the less frequent ones, and eventually one has to start all over again andlearn the true significance of the most frequent words once more. However, theproblems I am trying to deal with regard the content –and not the presentation– of


many of the collocations were not affected by leaving out the 600 mostfrequent words (depend increasingly, costly ‘smart’ weapons systems, la-ser-guided ‘smart bombs,’ Stealth fighter jet, thorough independent study).In other words, the structure of the text as a construction of chunks wasleft surprisingly intact.

Finally, a secondary result of this procedure is that we can nowbuild an important portion of the semantic field of the topic of the arti-cle, modern warfare, including the collocations. Here is a list of thesewords extracted from the same article on Desert Storm.

Effectiveness, expensive, high-tech aircraft, missiles, precision weapons, StealthFighter jet, Tomahawk land-attack missile, laser guided ‘smart bombs,’ costly‘smart’ weapons systems, perform, cheaper ‘dumb’ ones, plans, dependincreasingly, Congress, secret, conducted, Operation Desert Storm, DefenceDepartment, commanders, intelligence, pilots, planners, battlefield, unclassifiedsummary, secret, scheduled, figures, videotapes, shaft, extraordinary accuracy,Tomahawk missiles launched, precision-guided munitions, aircraft, carry, assess,effectiveness, bombing campaign, improved smart weapons, weaponry, arsenal,ways, locate, destroy targets, overwhelmed, deployed nearly 1,000 combat aircraft,unleashed nearly, tons, bombs, dropped, superior technology, presumed target,tank, truck, destroyed, sensors, laser, electro-optical, infrared systems, clouds,rain, fog, smoke, humidity, sleek F-117 Stealth fighter jet, highly touted ability,target evading detection, necessarily outperform older, cheaper aircraft, claimed,80 percent success, bombing runs, fighter, inappropriate, aircraft, effectivenessdemonstrated, higher- aircraft, generally, capable, lower- aircraft, bomb tonnagedropped, guided munitions, accounted, munitions, campaign data, validate,purported efficiency, guided munitions, target, smart bombs built, guidedmunitions, Pentagon weaponry, Patriot missile, nearly perfect, shooting, missiles,aimed.Fig. 23 Semantic field of ‘modern warfare’ extracted from a Herald Tribune articleon ‘Desert Storm.’

Naturally, if the aim were to document exhaustively the semanticfield of warfare this list should be completed and adapted manually, buteven this rather crude catalogue shows the possibilities of the technique,enabling one to draw semantic maps, taking authentic texts as a startingpoint. These semantic maps, together with their translations, provide uswith a syntagmatic –in some sense ‘onomasiological’– map of the lan-guage instead of a more traditional one, in which a word is related to its

messages communicating states of affairs.


synonyms and not to the words with which it is likely to occur in a nor-mal text22. In a text containing the words aircraft, bombing, guns, themeaning of drop would probably be related to bombs and thus theFrench translation would be larguer and not baisser; in Portuguese, lar-gar and not abaixar. Similarly, a round will mean cartucho in Portu-guese and not série or volta. As soon as a user had looked up a handfulof words, the electronic dictionary would be able to identify the matterof the text and direct all further searches accordingly. In the case ofpolysemy, this means that the dictionary programme would go first to themeaning most likely to appear in a text on gardening, football, etc.Fields would not have to be formally delineated. It would be sufficient tolink words or items and their translation: if in the same text an item x isproven to have a translation x1 and an item y a translation y1, than thetranslation of z is likely to be z1 as opposed to z2, z3 etc. 23

In an electronic dictionary, all the lexical items can be classified al-phabetically with their various meanings one after the other (lead, music;boxing; nautical; etc.), but also within these bigger groupings them-selves, together with the words they normally occur with. In current dic-tionaries, the various meanings of a word are listed together, but it ishighly unlikely for a same word to be used in more than one sense inone and the same text. It is when the text ends that another sense canbe chosen for the same word (lead refers to the mineral in an economicsurvey, and to play first violin in an article on music). In an electronic

22 It is this kind of consideration which induces some lexicographers to apply this

classification to the whole dictionary. This classification has the advantage of beingmore rational, yet less practical, at least in the case of printed dictionaries. As JeanBinon puts it:” De nombreux arguments militent en faveur d’un classementonomasiologique lorsqu’il s’agit d’encoder, de produire, de passer à la mise endiscours. En effet pour le décodage la consultation d’un dictionnaire a lieu au grédes lectures et des occurrences. Lors de la production en revanche on part d’uneintention de communication, d’une idée, on aborde un thème. On ne parle, onn’écrit pas alphabétiquement.” (Binon, 1995, no page number, electronic version)

23 Here is just one practical application of this. Most newspapers and other maga-zines are nowadays published on the Internet. This means that texts come moreoften to the reader in a machine-readable form. An electronic dictionary could siftthe 600 most common words out of an article, deduce from what is left what thetopic of the article is, then sort the order of the senses according to the senses thewords can have in texts on this topic.


dictionary a polysemous word can be stored in both classification sys-tems: in the alphabetical as well as the semantic grouping that gives it itssense.


2. ENCODING

Fig. 24 Scheme of an encoding dictionary based on the sequence of a typical look-up.

USAGECHOICE of the ITEM(meaning/appropriateness)

Via the L2 (synonyms) 'intelligent' thesaurus

Via the L1 bilingual dictionary

explicit

implicit (examples) selected real examples

'controlled' examples from example texts (encyclop.)

examples

synonyms

definition

labels

(collocations) list

(syntax) grammar rules

made-up examples


1. Introduction

As was the case for decoding, it is necessary here to make a distinctionbetween beginning and advanced learners. From an encoding point ofview, a distinction is traditionally made between beginners, intermediateand advanced.24 For compiling a dictionary, however, I would suggestthat there is no need for that much differentiation. It is sufficient to dis-tinguish between beginners and more advanced learners.When encoding, one can have the following problems:

1. one does not have any idea of what the word is in the target lan-guage;2. one knows the word superficially and could recognise it, butcannot recall it actively;3. one knows the word but is unsure of its collocates or its syntax.

All three problems will occasionally trouble the foreign language learnerof any level. However, the first kind of difficulty is encountered moreoften at the beginner’s level and will have specific consequences for thedesign of a dictionary. The second and third kinds of situation are moretypical of an advanced level and will be dealt with separately.

2. Encoding for Beginners

I will illustrate the problems of beginning language learners by means oftwo examples in Japanese. Japanese dictionaries are specially suited for

24 Although this distinction is well established, it has been poorly described and is

generally taken for granted. According to my own experience as a language teacherand learner, this distinction exists. At a beginners level, learners are concernedwith expressing simple messages on everyday matters. They are aware of the limi-tations placed on their communication capacities by their lack of knowledge andtheir queries aim at diminishing this lack. At an intermediate level, learners canexpress anything they want by means of congruent language, to use Halliday’s no-menclature. They only use grammatical metaphors sporadically. Seen from a dif-ferent angle and in accordance with Sinclair‘s terminology, intermediate learnersare able to express themselves well grammatically, but not naturally. Advancedlearners aim at a native-like fluency and they use idioms, grammatical metaphorsand pragmatically appropriate language.


this kind of demonstration since any Westerner who has a command ofonly European languages is a true beginner in Japanese. Lexicographersworking on Japanese dictionaries for foreigners clearly conceive theirdictionaries with true beginners in mind. The Japanese writing systemleaves no doubt as to the intended audience of each dictionary. It istherefore easy to choose precisely those designed for learners of Japa-nese, and not of English. Indeed, dictionaries using kanji, Chinesecharacters, are intended for Japanese or very advanced learners,whereas those written in romaji, the romanised alphabet, are designedfor a non-Japanese audience. As for dictionaries written in hiragana,they can be considered to be half way between kanji and romaji, but arein practice only a way to simplify the localisation of words for Japaneselearners, since the Introductions to these dictionaries are written inJapanese only.

First test sentenceTo make my point, I chose to translate a typical beginner’s sentence:The flowers are on the table. Beginning learners of Japanese will at leastknow that there are no articles in Japanese, no plurals, no verb inflec-tions which depend on the personal pronoun, that the word order is theinverse of English, and that the theme of the sentence is indicated bythe particle wa. This gives the following basic pattern to be translated:Flower-wa table on be.

Martin’s Concise Japanese Dictionary is a small dictionary with anEnglish-Japanese and a Japanese-English part. It uses kanji, hiragana,katakana, and roman characters. Using this dictionary allows us totranslate our sentence into: Hana wa teburu on desu. The dictionaryentry for on is:

On … de… �� (located) … ni… �� (atop) …no ue (de/ni) ... ��Fig. 25 Entry for on in Martin’s Concise Japanese Dictionary.

Needless to say, this is not an entry which is particularly helpful in ourcase, since there is no indication of what the differences are between thedifferent translation options. Then for whom is this information in-tended? The romaji part was certainly intended for a non-Japaneseaudience. The kanji character for ue, on the other hand, can only bemeant for Japanese. For these users, however, the romaji part is useless.If this information is meant for Japanese learners decoding an English


text and not knowing what on meant, then the dictionary should givethese three possible translations in kanji or hiragana, not in a Westernwriting system. If this information is instead intended for English learn-ers of Japanese, then they must be capable of distinguishing betweenthese three options for on. This is not exactly beginners’ knowledge. Thedictionary tells dictionary users that there are three possible translations,but merely makes them aware of this piece of information, and that theyare indeed incapable of telling the difference. Not a very refreshingpedagogical experience.

If, on the other hand, one is advanced enough learner to know howto use the different on’s in Japanese, one will most probably rememberthem without a dictionary. Consequently, this information is not meantfor advanced learners either. Moreover, if one feels unsure about theusage of each on, only examples or a grammatical explanation can help.None of these is present in the entry.

I suspect this is another example of the emblematic information alldictionaries include to a certain extent. Nobody can claim that the in-formation is not included. Yet nobody can tell what it is good for either.

Collins-Shubun tackles the problem of function words like on in adifferent way. In the concrete case of on, a whole section is dedicated toits various senses with examples to help beginners with their choice.

on [a:n] prep 1 (indicating position) ... (��)�[�] ... (no ue) ni (de)on the wall �� kabe niit's on the table � � (��)�� téburu (no ue) ni arimasuon the left �� hidari nithe house is on the main road �� ie wa kafisendoroni me shite imasu2 (indicating means, method, condition etc) ...� ...deon foot (go, be) ��aruiteon the train/plane (go) �� [� !] � de; (be) �� [� !] � "#�densha (hikoki) ni notteon the telephone/radio/television �$ [%&', ()*] denwa (rajio, terebi)deshe's on the telephone +,��$�-��[�$.��] kanojo wadenwa ni dete imasu (denwachu desu)I heard it on the radio /saw him on television /�%&'�01��2 [()* � +34��2] watakushi wa rajio de kikimashita (terebide kare wo mimashita)to be on drugs 5637#�� mayaku wo yatte iru


to be on holiday 89. kyuukachuu de aruto be away on business :;�-<=�� shooyoo de dekakete iru3 (referring to time) ... � ...nion Friday >?@� kinyoobi nion Fridays >?@� kinyoobi ni, AB>?@� maishu kin-yoobi ni, >?@A� kinyoobi goto nion June 20th 6 C20 C� rokugatsu hatsuka nion Friday, June 20th 6 C20 C>?@� rokugatsu hatsuka kinyoobi nia week on Friday DB� >?@� raishuu no kin-yoobi nion arrival he went straight to his hotel EF ��G+�H#I�J(KL 1��2 toochaku suru to kare wa massugu ni hoteru e ikimashitaon seeing this MN34�Gkore wo miru to4 (about, concerning) ... �O�� ni kan shiteinformation on train services P��O�� QR ressha ni kan suru joohooa book on physics. ST�U butsuri no hon� adv 1 (referring to dress) V�W=� mi ni tsuketeto have one's coat on X'Y3F�� kooto wo kite iruwhat's she got on? +,�Z3F��[ , kanojo wa nani wo kite imasu kashe put her boots/gloves/hat on +,�\]^ 3_�2 [`a3�b2,cd3[ #2] kanojo wa buutsu wo haita (tebukuro wo hameta, booshi wokabutta)2 (referring to covering): screw the lid on tightly e23�#[� fb�gh�futa wo shikkari shimete kudasai3 (further, continuously) i=� tsuzuketeto walk/drive/go on �1 [��j�, 1] i=� aruki (kuruma dè hashiri,iki) tsuzukeruto read on kli=� yomitsuzukeru� adj 1 (functioning, in operation: machine) m�� ugoite iru; (:radio, TV,light) W�� tsuite iru; (: faucet) no-�� mizu ga dete iru; (:brakes)[[#�� kakatte iru; (: meeting) i�� tsuzuite iruis the meeting still on? (in progress) �pqr.��[ mada kaigichuu desuka; (not cancelled) qr�stuv��7�w��[ kaigi wa yotei doori niyarun desu kathere's a good film on at the cinema xyz�{��xy37#��eigakan de ima ii eiga wo yatte imasu2: that's not on! (inf: of behavior) |N}�=�~w sore wa ikemasenFig. 26 Entry for on in Collins-Shubun.

In the Collins-Shubun, three hundred ‘keywords,’ function wordsand other very frequent words like ‘have’ and ‘be,’ were given the same‘extended treatment.’ In the case of our test sentence, The flowers are onthe table, Collins-Shubun gives the example It’s on the table (teburu niarimasu) which immediately reminds us of our test sentence. The trans-


lation is given both in romaji and in Japanese characters, although it isnot entirely clear what the kanji characters are for. Since the examplesentences do not include fixed expressions or idioms, they were obvi-ously intended for non-Japanese who, having to look up basic informa-tion of this kind, will not be able to decipher the kanji anyway. Onecould argue that they accustom the user to these characters and add tothe Japanese flavour. More likely, however, they are to convince Japa-nese learners of English that this dictionary was also intended for them.I am afraid that is not true.

Going back to our test-sentence, with the help of Collins-Shubun,the first tentative translation can be corrected into Hana wa teburu niarimasu. However, learners could still doubt if arimasu is the right verbin this case. This is where the romanised Japanese-English part of theMartin’s dictionary comes in hand. Since it mentions ‘it is (located)’ asone of the possible translations of arimasu, it confirms the informationretrieved from Collins-Shubun.

Second test sentenceAnother Japanese example illustrating the dictionary problems of begin-ners is the sentence Is the bank open? Martin’s provides the translationfor bank: ginko. Open is more of a problem.

open 1. opens it akemasu (akeru, akete) �=��, (�=�, �=�), (opens itup) hirakimasu (hiraku, hiraite) ��1�� (��, ��), (begins it)hajimemasu (hajimeru, hajimete) �b��, (�b�, �b�) 2. it opensakimasu (akui, aite) �1��, ��, ��; (it begins) hajimarimasu(hajimaru, hajimatte) �� (��, ��#�), a place, an event) opunshimasu (suru, shite) '–�� (��, ��), kaijo shimasu (suru, shite)�� (��, ��), (a shop/business) kaiten shimasu (suru, shite) �� (��, ��)Fig. 27 Martin’s entry for open. (Strangely, this dictionary does not mention open asan adj.)

Collins-Shubun tackles the problem as follows:

open [ou'pen] adj. (not shut: window, door, mouth etc) ��2 aita; (: shop,museum etc) ��.� eígyoochuu no, �� aite iru; (unobstructed: road)�v�� kaítsuushite iru; (view) �=2; (not enclosed; land)��;(fig: frank: person, manner, face) �I� sótchoku na; (unrestricted: meeting,debate, championship) �� vt �=�akéru, ��hiráku


� vi (flower, eyes, door, shop) ��akú ��; hiráku; (book, debate etc:commence) ��haj�aruin the open (air) �� yagá nian open car '��– ópùnkaaFig. 28 Collins-Shubun’s entry for open

Martin’s entry for open has two sub-sections, one headed by the expres-sion opens it, the other by it opens, a way of avoiding the use of transi-tive and intransitive. A further subdivision leads to: “(a shop/business)kaiten shimasu (suru, shite).” This entry induces learners to believe thatthe fact that something is open should be expressed by a verb and acomplement and not by an adjective, since the dictionary does not showthis possibility.

According to Collins-Shubun, however, open can be translated byan adjective as well as by a transitive or intransitive verb. In the case ofshops and museums, the suitable form, says the dictionary, is eigyochuno or aite iru. No indication is given as to the difference between thesetwo possibilities, which makes the information anything but helpful.Since what we want to ask is not if the bank opens but if it is open, onecan only venture to follow Collins-Shubun which results in: Ginko waeigyochu no desu ka or Ginko wa aite imasu ka.

In order to confirm this, we go back to the Japanese-English part ofMartin’s which tells us that eigyo means (running a) business! This seemsto mean that eigyochu no does not apply to our case. Aite, on the otherhand, appears to mean coming open and iru is the dictionary form ofimasu (is or stays). This gives a new translation: Ginko wa aite imasu kawhich is indeed the correct translation.

All this shows a typical beginner’s problem: uncertainty as to whathas to be looked up. This is not that much of a problem if one stayswithin the same family of languages, but it might be very intricate in-deed if one is accustomed to, for example, inflectional languages, andstudies an agglutinative language for the first time. The main problem Ihad with translating Is the bank open? came down to knowing in whatway open was lexicalised in Japanese. This shows clearly the funda-mental importance of simple examples, in great quantity, for the begin-ning learner25.

25 I have written some more on the case of Japanese in Humblé (1999).


Function wordsA first conclusion that can be drawn from these experiences is that abeginning learner has to go back and forth a number of times to retrievethe information necessary to solve, all things considered, a ratherstraightforward problem. The Martin’s team did not do enough researchas to how the dictionary would be used in practice.

Secondly, if we look at these experimental look-ups, it appears thatall beginners’ problems are somehow related to grammar: grammar at amacro level –the verb system in Japanese–, or at a micro level –functionwords. In terms of the micro level, Collins-Shubun is admirable in itstreatment of 300 keywords. This is particularly useful for beginninglearners who will seldom recognise the target item and will often learn itthrough a dictionary. In the case of as (in English), the examples are asfollows (in the dictionary these examples are followed by their transla-tion in Japanese, both in kanji and romaji).

1. (referring to time) as the years went by; he came in as I was leaving; as fromtomorrow2. (in comparisons) as big as; as much/many as; as much money/many books as; assoon as3. (since, because) as you can’t come, I’ll go without you; he left early as he had tobe home by 104. (referring to manner) do as you wish; as she said5. (concerning) as for/to that6. he looked as if he was ill7. (in the capacity of) he works as a driver; as chairman of the company, he…; hegave it to me as a presentFig. 29 As in Collins-Shubun English-Japanese Dictionary.

These examples contain only a few fixed expressions, showing that thisdictionary, in fact, targets English-speaking beginners. There is indeednot much chance that a Japanese learner will look up (to decode) a sen-tence like he came in as I was leaving, since it is perfectly understand-able if one knows what he, came, in, as, I, was, and leaving mean. Theexample phrases are almost exclusively of the open-choice type and al-low dictionary users to fill in the pattern with the words of their ownmessage. The adding of labels would in this particular case be superflu-ous, since labels are unavoidably more abstract than examples, in them-selves clear enough.

The separate grammar part in Collins-Shubun at the end of the vol-


ume is clear, but since it is a print dictionary, without the flexibility ofan electronic dictionary, the information was not included in the appro-priate spot. This dictionary could have been an ideal beginners’ paperdictionary had the lexicographers been allowed to concentrate on theEnglish speaking audience. The present dictionary contains 30.000headwords, far too many for (encoding) learners of Japanese and notenough for the (decoding) Japanese learners of English. This results in alack of examples and poor treatment of very frequent and difficult wordssuch as think, mean, know, etc. Unfortunately, Collins-Shubun aimed atbeing ‘useful to the language student and the native speaker alike’ and,as a result, a compromise was made. Unfortunately, an excellent con-cept was only partially carried out.

***

Learners have modest aims when encoding into a language they havejust started to study. This means they have modest demands in terms ofcontent words and a pressing need for information on function words.When choosing between several alternatives for a word, they will pro-ceed by comparing their sentence in their L1 to the ones listed underthe form of examples. Examples, particularly for function words, are ofthe utmost importance in this kind of dictionary since an encodinglearner does not always have a clear idea of what is the item to belooked up.

The analysis of two Japanese dictionaries for beginners suggeststhat even in cases when it is obvious that a particular audience shouldbe chosen, commercial considerations get in the way. In an attempt tosatisfy both encoders and decoders, clever lexicographic projects are im-perfectly carried out.

3. Encoding for Advanced Learners

Ideally, advanced learners have no morphological problems, they wantto use grammatical metaphors, the correct collocates and, from a prag-matic point of view, the appropriate expressions. In addition, the higheststage in language learning is characterised not only by the use of theappropriate word, but also by the use of the appropriate sequence ofwords, i.e. idioms and fixed expressions. Advanced learners aim at a na-


tive-like command of the foreign language. What kind of dictionarywould help them with this?

Basically, the look-up process can be subdivided into the choice ofthe item and its usage. These stages will normally follow each otherchronologically and in my argument I assume they do. However, thepossibility should not be excluded that a learner accesses the dictionaryat any of these stages. In other words, learners may skip the choice stageif they are only interested in usage.

Since I start from the presupposition that the dictionary of the fu-ture will be computer-based, random access to any of its componentparts is taken for granted. As I have not found much literature on thissubject, what follows draws basically on my own experience as a dic-tionary user and the experience of fellow dictionary users whom I haveobserved and interrogated over the last few years. I myself wrote down anumber of my own look-ups in as many languages as I could handle.These include Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Italian,German, Japanese, Latin, modern and ancient Greek, and Danish.These are languages in which I am a native speaker, advanced, inter-mediate, false beginner, absolute beginner, or almost ignorant.

1. Choice of the Item

The process of choosing the appropriate equivalent in the target lan-guage will usually start by looking up the item in a bilingual dictionary,i.e., proceed via the source language. This will be the subject of thischapter’s first section. In the second section, I will concentrate on userswho already have an idea of the target item and have the possibility ofproceeding via the target language to refine their choice.

1. Via the Source Language

When proceeding via the source language, i.e., through a bilingual dic-tionary, the odds are that the learner will be confronted with more thanone translation option. There are traditionally four ways to distinguishbetween various options: synonyms, labels, examples and definitions.Although all four have advantages and disadvantages, at least one issuited for each particular kind of item. In some cases, a synonym in thesource language will help the learner out. In others, an example. To be


effective, the dictionary should propose the most adequate option first,even if the lexicographers choose to offer more than one.

The moment users have located their item in the dictionary, there isa stage of decoding within the operation of encoding, a stage for whichmost of the observations I formulated for decoding are valid. The differ-ence here is that encoding is, as a whole, a much more precise activity.If the word to encode is avaliar and the dictionary suggests appraise,evaluate, value (Taylor, Portuguese-English Dictionary. 1963), encoderswill have to decode these translations to see which one fits their context.Since in a dictionary the particular context of the user is of course notincluded – while decoding users have their own text – , what the dic-tionary has to do is to provide one, of whatever kind, in order to enableusers to make their choice. This is what examples and definitions and, ina broader sense, synonyms and labels do. They all attempt to connectthe unknown word with something the learner knows.

The information for the dictionary user can be of two kinds:abstract and concrete. The two extremes of the spectrum are occu-pied by labels and by examples. Labels are often more abstract thanthe looked-up word when they give information on the semanticfield to which the word belongs. They can be of various degrees ofabstraction. Examples, on the other hand, give concrete informationby providing users with a type of context which they will or will notrecognise as the one they had in mind.

In order to distinguish between different lexical items from an en-coding point of view, the distinction between function and content wordsis again of some utility. The meaning of a content word tends to dependon the context, while the meaning of a function word depends on the co-text. In English, particular function words, such as pronouns, are gener-ally quite straightforward. Others, such as prepositions, are highly com-plex and can be translated in a variety of ways, depending on the wordswhich immediately follow.

In dictionary terms, this means that the correct translation of afunction word can be selected by putting it in an example followed by itstranslation. The translation of a content word, on the other hand, is de-cided on by referring to a semantic field, or a synonym in the sourcelanguage, in a label. In Collins-Shubun, the function word at has a dif-


ferent translation depending on whether the co-text is: at the top, atschool, to look at something, at 4 o’clock, etc. The labels which in thiscase accompany the examples (referring to position; time; rates, etc.) aresuperfluous.

A content word like French énergie can be translated in several dif-ferent ways into English, but the synonyms used in Collins-Robert (forcephysique; fermeté, ressort moral) go a long way towards disambiguatingthe possible translation options.

Clearly, each item should be examined in itself but, as a rule, sensedisambiguation of function words can be attempted fruitfully by meansof examples, and of content words by means of labels. In particularcases, a definition can help by stressing the specific features of a wordas opposed to its synonyms. However, this is at present rarely done.Synonyms in the source language are often useful, but since current dic-tionaries have four possible audiences, two encoding ones and two de-coding ones, it is not clear at all in which language the synonyms shouldbe.

Another way of looking at the problem is by means of the item’sfrequency. Allowing for a number of exceptions, one can say that themore frequent a word is, the greater the chances are that it can betranslated in many different ways. In addition, the number of possibletranslations of a word depends on the target language. Linguistically,and culturally, related languages have a greater likelihood of being par-tially isomorphic.

Labels

I will call a label anything between brackets giving an indication of themeaning or the pragmatic appropriateness of a word. While they are ex-tremely common, not much has been written on labels26 and I know ofno publication which considers the matter for the specific case of foreignlanguage lexicography. Meaning labels situate the item in a semanticfield: directly (maritime, agricultural, medical), or by means of anotherword which refers to it. This last modality – as in “régler (ajuster) toadjust [hauteur, dossier, micro, chauffage]” (Oxford-Hachette), where thelabel refers to machinery – has some characteristics of a disambiguation 26 Hartmann (1981, 1983) and Osselton (1996) discuss related areas.


by means of an example. It is the type of example that learners have to‘assemble’ themselves by using the label word in a made-up sentence.Labels of the pragmatic type indicate the word’s register by naming it:slang, formal, archaic, etc. and are rather straightforward.

Labels can be of various kinds: a reference to a semantic field; averb which can be used with the target noun; a noun which can be usedwith the target verb; a noun to which the target adjective can apply. TheOxford Spanish Dictionary uses, among others, the following labels:(naut.); (astrol.); (aviat.). These labels are very effective at disambiguat-ing the translation of a content word. The same technique would beuseless if applied to a function word. In the case of function word at, thesame dictionary separates the various senses by means of the followinglabels: indicating location, position; indicating direction; indicating time;indicating state; occupied with; with measurements, numbers, rates, etc.;with superlative; because of; concerning. In this case, classification bymeans of labels has no other purpose than to provide, at least formally,some kind of classification for the high number of examples in the entry.Yet most users will simply go straight to the examples ignoring the la-bels.

In the Oxford Spanish Dictionary, the two possible translations ofconstruir (build and construct) were distinguished by means of the fol-lowing labels:

a ‹ edificio/barco/puente › to buildb ‹ figura geométrica › to constructc ‹ frases/oraciones › to constructd ‹ sociedad/mundo › to build; construir un nuevo mundo to build a new world

Fig. 25 Construir in the Oxford Spanish Dictionary.

In this case, the user was directed to four alternatives by an indicationof the semantic field. Seen from a grammatical point of view, the labelshere are the direct objects of the translational equivalents in question,half way towards an example. One can construir un edificio, construiruna figura geométrica, etc.

These are a few of the many other kinds of labels found in theOxford Spanish Dictionary, and which are familiar to most people whohave ever dealt with dictionaries: “(Teatr); (Ven); (AmE); (BrE); (Ven


fam); (Ven arg); (Méx); (Dep); (AmS vulg); (AmE sl); (BrE sl); (colloq);(crit);. (para el pelo); (de un cangrejo); (en costura); (para la ropa).”

Some of these labels refer to a geographical area, some to what theword applies to, and some indicate the level of formality. They orientthe user not only to the right translation in terms of meaning, but also ofappropriateness. In this case, labels which are intended to help with de-coding have been mixed with labels intended for encoding. Indicationssuch as ‘de un árbol,’ ‘del queso,’ arg. (argot), are intended for encod-ing Spanish speakers, which is the reason why they are in Spanish.Strangely enough, the indications sl (slang), colloq (colloquial), and crit(criticised usage) are in English, although English speakers of the kindwho use dictionaries should know if the English word is slang or formal.This is one type of incoherence that results from targeting more thanone audience.

Concrete and abstractAs I stated, labels come in two varieties, concrete and abstract. When-ever possible, concretising should be preferred. I will illustrate this exabsurdo by means of an example of the opposite.

In the entry for oreille in Collins-Robert the labels are, among oth-ers: anatomie; ouïe; comme organe de communication. They are almostthe same as in Oxford-Hachette: anatomie, ouïe, personne. Unfortunately,these labels look somewhat like a scholastic exercise. One should ques-tion whether users in search of a translation for oreille will start askingthemselves if in their case oreille refers to something anatomical, a fac-ulty of hearing, or an organ of communication. Any disambiguationwhich requires from the user a supplementary effort of abstraction con-tradicts the dictionary’s aim of being a mere tool, as practical as possi-ble. When users are in search of an item, they look for something theyrecognise that is connected to what they want to express. This is mostlya word related to the field they are dealing with. A practical approachwhich gives the user supplementary information, of any kind, shouldtherefore prevail and publishers should let lexicographers be guidedmore by Hermann Rorschach than by Saint Thomas Aquinas. The entryfor demander (in its transitive sense) in Oxford-Hachette gives an exam-ple of a pragmatic approach. Any reference that ‘rings a bell’ has beenused:


1. (solliciter) [conseil, argent, aide, permission]; (dans une offre d’emploi) (…)2.(enjoindre) (…)3. (souhaiter) (…)4. (interroger sur) (…)5. (faire venir) [médecin, prêtre]; (dans son bureau) (au téléphone) (…)6. (nécessiter) [travail, tâche] [effort, attention, qualification]; [plante, animal].[attention]; [sujet, texte] (…)7. droit [tribunal] [peine, expertise]; [personne] [divorce]; [dommages-intérêts] (…)Fig. 26 Demander in Oxford-Hachette.

In this entry, the user finds: plain synonyms; the object of what can beasked for (conseil, médecin, etc.); the circumstances (tribunal). Re-markably, the type of labels has been adapted to the item in question.The lexicographers were not guided by any kind of orthodoxy, obligingthem to apply the same rule to each and every word. I do not think or-thodoxy agrees well with the diversity of lexis. A flexible kind of ap-proach such as the one applied in Oxford-Hachette and others, shouldinform all dictionary making. It should go as far as adapting the treat-ment of a word to the language to which it is translated. Here, as in allother aspects of dictionary making, contrastive information is the key toa learner-oriented dictionary.

Synonyms

Another way of differentiating the possible translations of an item isthrough synonyms in the source language. However, these synonyms willnecessarily have to be superordinates, and if the problem item refers it-self to an abstract entity and is also a verb, this may require a consider-able effort of reflection from the user. The entry for demander in Oxford-Hachette lists the following synonyms: solliciter; enjoindre; souhaiter; in-terroger sur; faire venir; nécessiter. The limits between these distinctionsare tenuous, and dictionary users will find it hard to decide in whichcategory their intended meaning falls.

Synonyms are quick and efficient ways of distinguishing senseswhen these are as clearly distinct as in table: piece of furniture; list. Theyare difficult to use in the case of subtle differences. Thus synonymsshould be used according to each case and not applied to every entry asa rule.


This brings us back to the phenomenon of internal and externalpolysemy. When native speakers are aware that a word has more thanone meaning – table (and chairs) vs. (time) table – translation disam-biguation by means of synonyms will be successful. This will not be soeasy for external polysemy – quelque chose as anything or something –in which native speakers are generally not aware of the different sensesof the word.

Examples

Examples direct learners towards a particular translation by putting theword in a co-text which they can compare to their own. As I have al-ready spent a few pages analysing the problem of examples, I will herelimit myself to highlighting the main features of their disambiguatingfunction. As I argued before, in the case of beginning encoders, exam-ples are vital and should consist of frequent phrases, or sentences withfrequent words. For advanced learners, however, the situation is differ-ent.

In the following list, I give a random sample of words with theirfrequency (according to Cobuild 2). Between brackets is the number ofsenses listed for each word in the dictionary.

nodiamond27

impudent(1)

dispersion(1)

ellipse (1) shirk (1) seducer(1)

1 diamond terse (1) mod (1) raven (2) pristine (1) orchard(1)

2 diamonds ratio (1) Carve (5) covering(1)

justified(2)

polite (2)

3 diamonds justify (1) massive (2) neutral (9) pipe (7) prior (4)4 diamonds finger (16) indicate (6) liberal (4) movie (2) print (20)5 diamonds form (20) half (16) go (49) nothing

(18)test (13)

Fig. 27 Illustrative table of a few word frequencies indicated in number of diamonds,and (between brackets) number of senses.

As this list suggests, internal polysemy does not necessarily mean exter-nal polysemy, but it is a strong indication that a word has more than onetranslation. To distinguish between the various translations of form inPortuguese (20 senses in Cobuild2; 53 possible translations in Houaiss’

27 In Cobuild2, ‘diamonds’ indicate the frequency of a word, the more ‘diamonds’

the more frequent the word.


Dicionário Inglês-Português), examples would be very effective since themeaning of form will depend to a large extent on the co-text. However,in the case of raven (two possible translations: ‘corvo’ and ‘cabelopreto’), examples might help but will be far less effective than a label.Here again the link between audience and content of a dictionaryemerges clearly: beginners need the translation of frequent words dif-ferentiated by means of examples; advanced learners need infrequentwords differentiated by means of labels or synonyms. This of course re-gards the differentiation of translation equivalents and does not meanadvanced learners do not need examples.28

The ability of examples to distinguish between different meaningsof words is directly proportional to their frequency. Indeed, dependencyon the co-text to indicate the meaning of a word is directly proportionalto its possibility of appearing in an idiom or a fixed expression. Themore frequent a word is, the more it tends to rely on the co-text to ac-quire meaning and the greater is the probability that an example will beable to give an idea of its meaning. The less frequent a word is, themore it has a meaning independent from the co-text, and the context.The more the meaning of a word depends on the co-text, the more ex-amples will help to distinguish different options.

Definitions

A fourth possibility of distinguishing between various translationequivalents is through a definition. This is the wordiest way of proceed-ing and should therefore be reserved for particularly intricate cases suchas words for which there exists only one equivalent in the source lan-guage. For instance, Spanish cambiar can be translated by alter orchange; sustituir can be translated by substitute and replace. In thesecases the difference has to be explained and cannot always be glossedover with a label or a synonym in the source language29. Japanese col-lege dictionaries have been doing this admirably for many years andCambridge Word Selector does something similar.

In practice, advanced learners get used to looking up a word in a

28 This is fully discussed in Chapter 4.29 The difference between substitute and replace does not coincide with sustituir and

reemplazar.


bilingual dictionary and then looking for additional information in amonolingual dictionary. However, this would be more effective if bothwere in the same volume and if the definition followed the translation. Ifthis definition is in the target language, there is a possibility that it willnot be entirely understood by the learner. A definition in the sourcelanguage could be more helpful in cases of subtle differences and wherethe distinction made in the target language does not exist in the sourcelanguage. Proceed Japanese-English Dictionary explains the differencesbetween declare, proclaim and pronounce, for instance, between job andpost, and many others, all in Japanese. The dictionary exhibitsexplanations of this kind on every page. What enables the Proceed’sauthors to do this with so much conviction is that they know preciselywho their audience is and what their problems are with very specificitems. Cambridge International Dictionary has been criticised for theway in which it introduced contrastive information in its first edition.However, it is predictable that other learner’s dictionaries will startadopting similar strategies in the future. It is different to learn English ifyou are Brazilian or Malay, and dictionaries will have to adapt to this30.

Longman Language Activator is a monolingual dictionary, but onecan imagine a bilingual dictionary using its type of definitions in order todistinguish between translations, somewhat along the lines of the Portu-guese-English Bridge Bilingual31. The Activator tackles the task of defin-ing each alternative quite well despite occasional unhelpful abstractions.In the case of improve, for instance, the Activator makes the followingintroductory distinctions.

30 Nesi (1994) refers to this issue.31 A reminder of how the Portuguese-English Bridge Bilingual uses both English and

Portuguese:

lug, lugs, lugging, lugged, VB com OBJ Se você lug um objeto pesado, você ocarrega com dificuldade; uso informal. She lugged the suitcase out into the hallway.


IMPROVE1. to become better in standard or quality2. ways of saying that a situation or someone’s life becomes better, more enjoyable,less difficult etc.3. to make something better by making changes, working harder etc.4. to keep improving something that is already good until you make it perfect5. to make a situation, quality, or someone’s life better and more interesting, moreenjoyable etc.6. a change or addition that improves somethingFig. 28 Improve in Longman Language Activator.

In this case, the alternatives correspond each to a different section. Inthese sections, several synonyms are suggested. The concept is excellentand really thought out with the users’ needs in mind. Even so, it seemsrather unlikely that learners will choose their particular sense of improvefrom this rather abstract list. On the other hand, the definitions of thesynonyms themselves that render the idea of improvement are as clear ashumanly possible. On must admit that the task is hugely difficult sincethe differences between make something better, fine-tune, brush up andclean up (among others) are evident for native speakers, but difficult tomaster for learners. One of the problems is that the different alternativesare defined in relationship to the hyponym, not to the other synonyms.Streamline is defined as ‘to improve a system or process by…,’ upgradeis defined as ‘to improve something such as machinery …,’ but stream-line is not contrasted with upgrade.

The advantage of a bilingual dictionary would be the smaller num-ber of synonyms from which to distinguish. If a Brazilian learner wanteda translation for aprimorar she or he would have to choose between re-fine and perfect and would not have to start from the hyponym improve.The Activator perpetuates a tradition of “English dictionaries for speak-ers of any language” that has been useful until recently, but they willprobably split up into minor areas and focus more on specific languages.

Definitions are useful distinguishing synonyms (modernise/upgrade),except when different translation options are the result of polysemy(lead (metal) and lead (guide)). In this case, in which the equivalents inthe target language are completely different, a simple translation wouldmean much less work, for lexicographer and learner alike. Since defini-tions place more demand on the learner’s powers of abstraction, theyshould only in specific cases be used to disambiguate synonyms.


2. Via the Target Language

More advanced learners may prefer to obtain their information directlyvia the target language. In this case, they will necessarily start fromsome kind of target language input. This can be of various kinds: a su-perordinate; elements of a definition; number of syllables; sounds; ges-tures (‘something you do with your fingers to show approval’); or a com-bination of these elements. To be able to do this kind of search wouldbe particularly useful for advanced learners who only have difficultyremembering an item, or want to turn their passive knowledge active.Advanced learners often have a good idea of what they want to say inthe target language, but may want to express themselves either in amore formal way; or by using an idiomatic expression; a metaphor; or afixed expression. Furthermore, learners may have an idea of the defini-tion of the word they are looking for, without knowing the word itself.For a number of advanced learners the ideal dictionary may be an im-proved kind of thesaurus. A thesaurus presupposes that there is alreadya word in the mind of the learner, but that this word is inadequate forsome reason: register; congruent32; metaphorical; lack of precision; re-gional variant.

Some of the publications now on the market which are termed ‘the-saurus’ could just as well be called synonym dictionaries and some, suchas the Concise Oxford Thesaurus, indeed bear the subtitle A Dictionary ofSynonyms. In what follows I consider a thesaurus to be any book whichlists synonyms together with some supplementary information. This in-formation can be in the form of an example, a label, or a non-alphabetical classification.

Finding a Word Starting from its Definition

Let us imagine a situation in which learners have an idea of some of thecomponents of the definition of a lexical item they are looking for and ofthe words they collocate with. A learner should be allowed to input‘generous’ and ‘fight’ as a collocate and be presented with the wordmagnanimous; or ‘abundant’ and ‘give’ as a collocate and get lavish.These input words could include descriptions of physical gestures suchas ‘forward,’ combined with an indication of its semiotic meaning ‘dis-

32 In the Hallidayan sense of the word (Halliday, 1994)


content’ and the search should yield pout. Of course this presupposesthat there is some kind of simple, congruent definition for the word likethe one Oxford Wordpower gives for pout: “to push your lips, or yourbottom lip, forward to show that you are not pleased about something.”

The electronic Collins English Dictionary and Thesaurus and Ran-dom House Webster’s have a feature which allows users to search thedefinitions for specific words. The difficulty is, however, that the learnerhas to use exactly the same words as those that were used in the defini-tion. In the case above with Oxford Wordpower, for instance, this meansone has to use the phrase not pleased instead of discontented. In a com-puter based dictionary this could rather easily be remedied since asynonym dictionary can be used to reduce the user’s needs for a par-ticular definition. On the other hand, a more analytical and even playfulmethod would be to start from lips, go to movement then to forward,then to irritation or discontent or not pleased. Additionally, the definitionstored in the dictionary/thesaurus should be of a kind learners them-selves would be able to formulate, i.e., not include very infrequentwords.

Next is another example of a problem which a thesaurus couldsolve. Suppose that a learner, inspired by the French expression ‘êtred’une grande utilité’ and the Dutch ‘een grote hulp zijn,’ wants to ex-press the ill-formulated idea: ‘the encyclopaedias are of great help.’There must be a way of saying this in English along the lines of:

— are of great help— are of great use— are of great utility— are a great help— are a big help

Learners should be allowed to look up ‘help’ + ‘utility’ for the dic-tionary to give them the right expression under several forms: formal,informal, metaphor, vulgar, plain, etc.

Using the same principle, a learner could find the right collocate. Atypical learner’s question could be: ‘Does one really say draw the cur-tains?’ It would be useful to be able to click on the word curtain, then tochoose between adjective, verb, etc. and be given a list of possibilities.


Varying the Register

It is extremely difficult for learners, even advanced ones, to be surewhether the register of the word they are about to use is right. Foreign-ers using informal expressions in formal contexts and vice-versa are afrequent source of jokes in academic circles. It is a typical task for athesaurus to eliminate this kind of confusion. Learners often know theformal, or neutral, word for what they want to say, but would like tosound more vernacular. Specifically in English, a learner would oftenprefer a phrasal verb rather than Latin equivalent. However, beforedoing so, one has to be entirely sure of the implications of the alterna-tive option. How do native speaker thesauruses tackle this question?

In the case of a word such as man, Collins Thesaurus offers thefollowing alternatives: ‘bloke (Brit. inf.), chap (Inf.), gentleman, guy(Inf.), male.’ If the learner had a memory laps, this list will surely help.For most learners, however, the precise difference between a bloke anda chap will not be clear if the only supplementary information they get isthe indication “informal.”

Once again, it is unclear whose problem this indication of “infor-mal” is supposed to solve. Typically, a thesaurus user is an encodinguser and she or he has to be very sure that the word she or he is goingto use is the right word. If native speakers are targeted here, they mightfind a particular alternative in the thesaurus of which they were at firstunable to think. But in this case the indications Brit. and inf. are super-fluous since a native speaker knows if they are informal or typically Brit-ish. For a non-native speaker in search of a more informal way of refer-ring to a man –for instance, translating cara in Portuguese, mec inFrench, tío or tipo in Spanish, and so on– the choice between guy, blokeand chap remains hazardous if no supplementary information is sup-plied. This supplementary information would have to be looked up inanother dictionary. One could contrast the Collins Thesaurus with Ro-get’s. Published several times and directed exclusively at native speak-ers, the latter is well adapted to their specific needs: not to learn theword, only to recall it starting from the idea.

The Random Webster’s Thesaurus is meant for native speakers but ishelpful for L2 learners because it is a thesaurus that separates thesenses by means of an example. The result is a very clear overview of all


the possibilities. Although the Thesaurus does not contain any registerindications sufficiently explicit to help out L2 non-native speakers, stillsomething can be learned from it:

man n.1. Man cannot live by bread alone: mankind, the human race, men and women,human beings, humankind, people, humanity, Homo sapiens.2. Every man must follow his own beliefs: individual, person, human being,human, living being, living soul, soul, one; anyone, somebody, someone.3. The average man is taller than the average woman: male, masculine person;gentleman, chap, fellow; Slang guy, gent.4. The minister pronounced them man and wife: married man, husband, spouse;Informal hubby.5. Hire a man to take care of the garden: handyman, workman, hired hand, hand,laborer, day laborer; employee, worker; manservant, male servant, boy, waiter,footman, butler, male retainer; assistant, helper, right-hand man; male follower,subject, liegeman, henchman. v.6. The crew was ordered to man the lifeboats: attend, staff, take up one’s positionin, take one’s place at, get to one’s post; supply with hands, furnish with men,people; equip, fit out, outfit; garrison.Fig. 29 Man in Webster’s Thesaurus.

These kinds of examples –common to a number of dictionaries– doesnot give the meaning of the word but only help to disambiguate its vari-ous senses. It does this more effectively than a definition would, whilestill proving that native speakers are the intended audience, for the indi-cation slang for guy and gent is too vague for L2 learners and hence su-perfluous.

Rudolf Meldau recognised and successfully tackled this problem inhis thesaurus Schulsynonymik der deutschen Sprache. Its design showsthat the author had a clear idea of his audience’s needs. 300 entriescover between 1500 and 1600 synonyms. When appropriate there is aclear explanation of each word’s register. Apart from this, there is awealth of examples that help situate the word in its register. UnderMann one finds Herr, Mannsbild, Kerl. The information for Mannsbild,for instance, is: “fig.; Umgangssprache, meist abschätzig, seltenbewundernd.“ There are 6 examples for Mannsbild, 34 for Mann, acomparable number for Herr and Kerl, making this thesaurus exemplaryas a learner’s thesaurus.

Native speakers use a thesaurus to recognise words, and learnersuse them to learn new words. To be really practical, and in computer


terms, a superordinate should be surrounded by boxes on which toclick, each of them mentioning one of its different lexical realisations.One would start from man and ask for something “less formal,” or”more scientific,” ”vulgar,” etc. and examples would complement theinformation. It would look like this:

man ! formal !common use ! gentleman! scientific (human beings) ! male! as a type ! male

! informal ! American ! guy! British ! modern ! bloke (esp. working class)

! modern ! guy! critical ! fellow! slightly old-fashioned ! chap (middle and upper-class)

Fig. 30 Man in an L2 learner-oriented thesaurus.

The difference between a native speaker’s and a learner’s thesau-rus resides in the amount of information necessary to distinguish be-tween several options. One example illustrating an option, even if wellchosen and translated, is often not enough.

Advanced learners are able to evaluate the tenor of a word by itscontext, provided there is a huge number of instances. Only a corpuscan provide this. Here the use of authentic material seems to be the bestchoice since it is precisely in the area of register that made-up examplesare weakest. Made-up examples are certainly justified in the case of be-ginners, but they cannot give a correct idea of a word’s use for ad-vanced learners.

Changing from Congruent to Metaphoric

The main task of an advanced learner’s dictionary is to help learners‘complicate’ their messages. Making their messages less congruent isone way of doing this. Native discourse is pervaded by metaphors. Be-ginning learners have limited ways of expressing themselves and tend toadapt their message to what they are able to say. Advanced learners, onthe other hand, have a message and study its most adequate wording.

The area of metaphors is virtually unexplored in foreign languagelexicography. Although metaphors are language specific, languages of-ten use metaphors for the same phenomena and there are certain areaswhich are more susceptible to being encoded by means of a metaphor


than others. ‘Not to see anything’ is an example of a universal metapho-risation (I can’t see a thing; no veo ni gota, je n’y vois goutte, ik zie geenfluit, não vejo bulufas, etc.); ‘not to care about something’ (I don’t give adamn; me importa tres pimientos; je m’en fous; het kan mij geen barstschelen; não estou nem aí). There are certain areas for which one in-stinctively feels there must be a metaphorical and thus more natural ex-pression. In a learner’s thesaurus one should be allowed to input thecongruent expression and get the metaphorical one. There are, to thebest of my knowledge, no available dictionaries which do this kind oftranslation, although the elements to compile one are already containedin the many native speaker’s thesauruses currently on the market. Web-ster’s Thesaurus dedicates special attention to metaphorical expressions,including what Halliday (1994, Ch. 10, passim) would call grammaticalmetaphors, but one has to pick them out individually. Here is the entryfor think:

reason, reflect, cogitate, deliberate, turn over in the mind, mull over, ponder,contemplate, meditate, ruminate, have in mind, make the subject of one’s thought,dwell on, brood, keep in mind, remember, recall, recollect, use one’s wits, rackone’s brain. (my emphasis)Fig. 31 Think in Webster’s Thesaurus.

In addition to metonymies, advanced learners feel the need to usegrammatical metaphors. Halliday calls expressions such as ‘use one’smind,’ ‘apply the mind,’ ‘take a walk,’ ‘dar uma esperadinha,’ ‘aan debeurt zijn’ (‘to be one’s turn’) grammatical metaphors. They are essen-tial for anybody aiming at a native-like fluency since they are the normalnative speaker’s way of talking. Grammatical metaphors, unlike meta-phors in the strict sense of the word, might not exist in every languagefor the same activities. One ‘has a headache,’ ‘a des maux de tête,’‘heeft hoofdpijn,’ ‘hat Kopfschmerzen,’ etc., but in Japanese the morecommon way to say it is ‘atama ga itai desu,’ ‘my head hurts,’ even ifthe metaphorical way exists. Likewise, I do not know of any languageapart from Portuguese where you can ‘give a (little or normal size of)waiting’ (dar uma esperadinha/esperada), ‘holding’ (segu-rada/seguradinha), ‘talking’ (falada/faladinha). However, these expres-sions are essential for anyone aiming at native-like proficiency in Brazil-ian Portuguese and a learner’s thesaurus can give the user easy accessto this information.


Fixed Expressions

Non-native speakers can sound less congruent when communicating in aforeign language, by using fixed expressions. The problem with findingfixed expressions in a monolingual dictionary is that, although the ideaswhich can be expressed in this way often coincide, their lexicalisation isdifferent. There is no reason why think hard should mention eyebrows asin quemarse las cejas, or neurones as in queimar neurônios. Nevertheless,there is a fair chance that a language has a fixed expression for thinkhard as opposed to the activity of, e.g., parking one’s car.

Similes, which we can consider a kind of fixed expression, arerather well documented because they are so obviously typical of eachlanguage and are recognised as such by its speakers. In my experience,English-speaking people are aware that not necessarily everyone on thisplanet thinks of pitch as the epitome of black nor of a cricket as thequintessence of liveliness. Yet the English do, and say black as pitch andlively as a cricket. The ideal thesaurus should allow a learner to find afixed expression by inputing a few words.

This procedure is not very different from finding a word through itsdefinition, yet I know of no electronic dictionary which has even begunto develop this feature. It presupposes listing the fixed expressions of alanguage and defining them in terms of words which would be used tocall them up. Current idiom dictionaries – as fixed expressions are alsocalled – list the idioms according to their components, not their mean-ing, which makes these dictionaries useless for learners. To understandwhat go through the mill means, a learner will consult a dictionary,probably the entry mill, and indeed all the bilingual dictionaries I con-sulted mentioned the expression. What is lacking is a dictionary allowingthe learner to encode go through difficult times as go through the mill, orthrough a sticky patch. Similarly, defeat to meet your Waterloo and dis-agree should lead to be at odds with. The fact that such an evidently use-ful and easily realisable tool is not yet on the market is indicative of thelack of research into the needs of advanced learners.

FormulasThere is a long-standing tradition of dictionary appendixes that deal withanother kind of fixed expressions which could be classified as formulasand are a kind of idiom in the Sinclairian sense of the word. Previously,


dictionaries would limit themselves to formulas used in letters, but thissection has been expanded lately to fixed expressions based on ananalysis of the functions of language. In its appendix, Collins-Robert listsSuggestions, Advice, Offers, Requests, alongside more conventional itemslike Correspondence and Announcements. No doubt this is very valuableinformation, of the kind learners aiming at a native-like fluency shouldtry to master. However, the problem here is the user interface. The listof functions and their wording as they appear in Collins-Robert is themost complete one I know and is very valuable. Yet, which learner willthink first of the statement they want to produce as an expression of the‘mechanics of argument,’ then pass on to the section ‘moderating astatement’ to find ‘Sans vouloir critiquer cette façon de procéder, il semblecependant qu’…’?

This is a recurring problem in lexicography, which I call the ‘trian-gle problem.’ The dictionary user has in mind an expression at a certainlevel of abstraction. In order to retrieve the information in the dictionaryshe or he has to elevate that level, only to come back down afterwards,in the other language, to the level of abstraction she or he started from.For instance, a learner has in mind the Portuguese verb papear. To findthe correct translation that has the same level of abstraction (chat), thislearner has to raise the level of abstraction to, say, communicate verballyin an informal way.

This is a mental operation which most encoding learners are reluc-tant to perform, unless there is no other way of doing it or skipping it.Instead of this, a more realistic option could be to include these formu-las in the body of the dictionary where the input of two or more wordswould lead the dictionary to suggest the rest, exactly as current elec-tronic dictionaries with a browse-feature. The problem could be dealtwith as Sinclairian idioms, since this is what these formulas are. There isa strong possibility that, for instance, given in Collins German Dictionaryas a way to Argumente abschwächen (soften arguments), allows very fewvariations, if any. Starting from the source language, there is no reasonwhy the formula cannot be included under the entry for think.

2. Usage of the Item

Once the item is selected, attention must be paid to its usage. Althoughit is now generally accepted that lexis and grammar are a whole which


Halliday qualifies as a lexico-grammar, choosing the item and learninghow it should be inserted into a text has purely formal aspects which thedictionary should teach. These formal aspects of encoding refer mainlyto syntax and collocates, and this information can be transmitted implic-itly or explicitly depending on the case and on the learner’s personalpreferences.

The explicit way to transmit information on syntax is to list withevery word the ‘formula’ of its use – the constraints to which it is sub-jected. The explicit way to transmit collocational information is to list allthe lexical items that combine with the item in the target language.

The implicit way of transmitting this information is through exam-ples. Different kinds of examples, combining various types of informa-tion, were described above. I will discuss the advantages of a few ofthem for the purpose of encoding.

1. Explicit Information

Syntax

For the purpose of this book, syntax is a set of rules which governs theuse of a lexical item within a sentence. These rules intertwine to variousdegrees with the meaning of the item and I am aware of Sinclair andFrancis’s work on this issue (Francis, 1996). In some cases they arelikely to appear to a learner as arbitrary and simply typical of a particu-lar language, whereas in other cases these rules may be arbitrary inthemselves, although intimately meaning-related. I suggest that the wayin which the dictionary should handle each of these cases will dependon the category to which these items belong. I see two possibilities,meaningful and meaningless syntax, and I will now give a few examplesof each together with how I think the dictionary should handle each ofthese problems.

***

In Japanese, the pattern ‘because followed by a verb’ is translated by theformula [nazenara … <verb in dictionary form> kara desu]. This is apattern which may have some meaning within the context of the Japa-


nese language, meaning which would emerge if one did a special re-search on the subject, but for the learner it is a purely technical,‘meaningless’ question. In this case, the dictionary should explicitly pro-vide the ‘formula,’ along with a few illustrative examples.

An example in French is the use of the subjonctif after verbs ex-pressing will. Although there is a remote connotation of ‘unreality’ in-volved in the use of the subjonctif, this is of little concern to encodingdictionary users and this sort of information should not hamper theirqueries. In this case as well, a simple formula should orient the learner.

In other cases, however, syntax is intimately intertwined with theword’s meaning. In English, indulge is used in the patterns: verb + in +noun; verb + noun; and pronominally. In each of these constructions,indulge means something different and, e.g., in French the translationequivalent for each of these patterns is a different word : céder à; donnerlibre cours à; gâter; se laisser tenter; boire de l’alcool; se livrer à; se faireplaisir; s’offrir; se faire une gâterie en faisant….

In the case of items of arbitrary syntax, a dictionary should provideexplicit information; examples are still important, but only secondarily.If the dictionary only gives a number of examples of the Japanese con-struction for because, these might not make the learner aware of the factthat the verb has to be in the dictionary form (and not in the -masu, -te, -nai, or -ta form). Yet, this is essential information, which should begiven explicitly. In the second situation, on the other hand, such as inthe case of indulge, explicit information can be given, but examples aremuch more important. Indeed, when syntax conveys meaning, the co-text reveals this. So much so, that this is a strong case in favour of theuse of authentic examples. The information conveyed by syntax is sosubliminal and subtle that no lexicographer is capable of grasping it inall its complexities. Examples are needed here, authentic, and in largequantity.

***

Information on syntax is typical of production dictionaries and can befound in two forms: general information in a separate part of the dic-tionary, or particular information concerning specific items under theappropriate entries. I am very much in favour of considering a diction-ary a word-based tool in the sense that every word –it should ideally be


‘every word-form’–, particularising all the information so as to fit spe-cific lexical items, i.e., concentrating everything in the entries, and notunder other headings. Explicit syntax indications in a dictionary arecontroversial because of their necessarily abstract and compact charac-ter, and abbreviations are partly to blame for some of the dictionary’sunpopularity. The understandable reason for this is, as always, lack ofspace. This is likely to change with electronic dictionaries, although theones published to date still follow the print tradition.

Furthermore, dictionary users are instinctively put off by grammarbecause it demands a fair amount of mental effort and one cannotalways be sure it is the best way of coping with a specific item’sproblems. However, when the syntax indications are not followed by anillustrative example, some users will not consider it worth the effort.

Syntax indications should therefore not be used indiscriminatelybut only when they really help and are vital to show how a word must beused, this is: when a word’s syntax has no bearing on its meaning (as inthe syntactical constraints of because in Japanese). If not, (as in the caseof indulge), implicit syntax information in the form of examples will bemore efficient than a grammatical formula.

Collocations

Collocations are a neglected problem. Although the advent of corporashould have made it easier to deal with the issue, there does not seem tobe much awareness of its importance. Advanced learners often have avast passive knowledge and simple solutions as E. H. Mikhail’s Diction-ary of Appropriate Adjectives, which lists 4000 nouns with their possibleadjectives, can be highly effective. This explicit way of giving informa-tion on collocates can be even more helpful than examples. Collocatesconsist, by definition, of the words which occur most often with the tar-get word. It is therefore likely that if advanced learners want to use aword, they will recognise the one that goes with it and applies to thecontext at hand. Examples could additionally dispel any doubts.

1. Implicit Information: Examples

Examples are a key feature for encoding learners. They can make theexplanation of the meaning of a word more precise, show in which con-


texts it is used, what the collocates are and what its syntax is. In chapter3 I discussed the current situation of examples and established a fewcriteria; I will now concentrate on how different kinds of examples canspecifically assist encoding. As I said before, a learner needs an enor-mous number of examples to be able to use a word correctly. Even theLongman Language Activator, which claims to concentrate on encoding,does not give more than three examples per word, and this is often notenough.

For the purpose of encoding I distinguish three kinds of examples:made-up, authentic, and controlled. The distinction between made-upand authentic is clear. ‘Controlled’ examples are those retrieved frompublications such as encyclopaedias and other reference works whichtarget not only a native-speaker audience.

Made-up vs. authentic examples

Made-up examples are the most common type and until recently theywere the only ones available. The first examples of the Oxford Learner’sDictionary were supposed to confirm and corroborate definitions. Theywere, in this sense, decoding aids. At the same time they also taughtsomething about the syntax of the word. However, made-up examplespresume the lexicographer knows the learners’ problems and whatlearners should be taught. This may be true for the most frequent sensesof the most frequent words, but perhaps not for the rest of the lexis.

House and home are frequent words translated by casa in Portu-guese. It is unlikely that these words will be looked up more by ad-vanced learners than by beginners. Below are the examples for house inthe Oxford Wordpower, aimed at intermediate students.


1a building that is made for one family to live in Is yours a four-bedroomed or a three-bedroomed house? Note: Look at bungalow, cottage and flat. Your home is the place where youlive, even if it is not a house: Let’s go home to my flat. Your home is also the place where you feel that you belong. A house is just abuilding: We’ve only just moved into our new house and it doesn’t feel like home yet. You can build, do up, redecorate or extend a house. You may rent a housefrom somebody or let it out to somebody else. If you want to move house you goto an estate agent. 2[usually singular] all the people who live in one house Don’t shout. You’ll wake the whole house up.Fig. 31 Examples for house in the Oxford Wordpower.

The first example seems rather inadequate. The word bedroomed ismore difficult than house and the structure Is yours a…? must sound abit strange even to intermediate students. The example Let’s go home tomy flat is better because it illustrates the helpful comment on the dis-tinction house-home. It is presumably not a very natural example. How-ever, it fulfils the function that paradigmata fulfil in traditional Latingrammar teaching. If learners learn by heart Let’s go home to my flat, itis unlikely they will ever say Let’s go house to my flat. The examples forhome counterbalance this with the example That old house would makean ideal family home. This is not a very natural sentence either but itshows the distinguishing features of the words home and house, allowinglearners to make grammatically correct if not very natural sentences.The example We’ve only just moved into our new house and it doesn’t feellike home yet reinforces this teaching point, clearly the lexicographers’intention.

Particularly in the case of very frequent words like house, authenticexamples do not fulfil any immediately evident purpose, at least not ifthe dictionary is aimed at beginning students. Cobuild2 includes thefollowing ones for the first sense of house:

She has moved to a small house and is living off her meagre savings.…her parents’ house in Warwickshire.Fig. 32 Cobuild2 examples for the first sense of house.

In the first example, meagre is, in Cobuild‘s own classification, a one-diamond frequency word and live off is probably not more frequent.


The second example is too short to be helpful. No reference is made tohome and none of the examples make clear the difference betweenhouse and home.

It is when made-up examples are used for less frequent words, thatthe superiority of authentic examples shows clearly. Impetus is a verylow frequency word. The entry in the Oxford Wordpower is:

impetus noun [uncountable] [singular]something that encourages something else to happenI need fresh impetus to start working on this essay again.Fig. 33 Impetus in Oxford Wordpower.

This example has probably been made up. Any foreigner looking upimpetus for encoding reasons supposedly knows what the word means,and at the most wants to confirm this knowledge. This kind of learnerneeds information on syntax and collocates (gain, sustain, add, strong,fresh, etc.), not on meaning, and an example illustrating only what thedefinition says is not of much use. An authentic example would inevita-bly carry that sort of information and an authentic corpus has lots ofthem for most words.

Controlled examples

As a kind of authentic examples, I find ‘controlled examples’ to be veryuseful. They are not being used by any dictionary –or CD-Rom with adictionary coupled to an encyclopaedia, which should be utterly simple–, but can be found by means of several CD-Rom encyclopaedias. Al-though not conceived for this purpose, they are a fast way of providing agreat number of examples. Encyclopaedia examples have the advantageof being authentic while also providing a broader context for the word athand. Moreover, the language used in this kind of example is mid-range, both from the point of view of the register and the difficulty of thelanguage. The following are only five of the 140 examples which theGrolier Encyclopaedia came up with for infrequent impetus:


1. The introduction of powered flight by means of the dirigible, a cylindricalballoon driven by propellers, and more important, by the first primitive airplanesgave impetus to the development of military air forces. (Air Force)2. The California GOLD RUSH of the 1850s provided the impetus for the initialwave of immigrants from China. (Asian Americans)3. The development of digital computers, which can monitor external conditionsand make appropriate adjustments to a system, added further impetus to theapplications of automation. (Automation.)4. In the wake of the abortive coup d’etat attempted by hard-line political elementsin the USSR in mid-August 1991 the three Baltic States received new impetus intheir struggle for independence. (Baltic States)5. Although Bacon was not a great scientist, he gave impetus to the development ofmodern inductive science. (Francis Bacon)Fig. 34 Five examples for impetus in the Grolier Encyclopaedia.

These five randomly chosen examples all obey a regular, uncomplicatedsyntax, use an advanced type of vocabulary and provide learners with anumber of collocates (give, provide, add further, receive new), which theywould have difficulty collecting from learner's dictionaries. If a learnerhas any doubt about the meaning, or the range of applicability of theitem, she or he can read as much of the context as required (and consultthe built-in dictionary).

By contrast, we can compare these examples to the two Cobuild2impetus examples. They are of course authentic as well, but of a totallydifferent character, as I hope to show below.

This decision will give renewed impetus to the economic regeneration of EastLondon…She was restless and needed a new impetus for her talent.Fig. 35 Examples for impetus in Cobuild2.

Apart from the fact that two examples may be too few to start using anynew word with sufficient confidence, the examples themselves are notlearner-friendly since there is no way a learner can gauge with any cer-tainty the type of publication – or speech – these examples come from.The first one reads like a newspaper article, whereas the second onesounds like fiction. Yet with so little information, learners will have diffi-culty finding out whether impetus is a suitable word for their particularcontext.

In spite of this and because impetus happens to belong to a ratherformal register, there is not much chance a learner would make a regis-


ter error taking the Cobuild examples as a model. However, the suitablecollocates for impetus are not clear. Since there is no repetition, there isno way for learners to know what these collocates are. From these ex-amples they can only deduce that give, renewed, need and new can safelybe used with impetus, not whether they are particularly frequent. From aquick glance at the examples from the Grolier Encyclopaedia, on theother hand, the collocates appear immediately. Moreover, this kind ofuncontroversial style gives learners a trustworthy model. It is unlikelythat learners want to use a word in a very original and experimental wayright from the beginning. What they need are examples showing how theword is used, in a comprehensible style. This is not the case with corpusexamples, at least in the way they are presently made available. Thefollowing are the first five examples from a total of 14 retrieved from thecorpus of the Cobuild Dictionary on CD-ROM:

1. This weekend is our reunion when we meet again to reflect upon the tour withthe impetus of our slides and photographs to invoke memory. (ephemera)2. The committee agreed. Whispers that the committee had been wanting to nameArnie for years, waiting impatiently for Jack to reach the same conclusion.Whatever the impetus, the good deed was done. (magazine)3. But you have to dive at a spectacular angle to gain sufficient impetus for a loopor roll, the control forces becomes (sic) high, and the speed drops off quickly andthe nose pointed upwards. (magazine)4. 5 per cent and that provided the impetus for an upward surge in trading at theSt Leger Sales after a series of disasters had set the market back a full decade.(magazine)5. There were growing fears that the rift would sour the annual Group of Sevensummit and prevent the leaders of the West from providing fresh impetus for thelong-running Gatt round. (newspaper)Fig. 36 Five examples for impetus from the Cobuild CD-ROM.

In the first example, the use of we indicates a rather informal setting andthe words within the nine-word span (of our slides) are clearly not regularcollocates. Examples 2 and 3 present a peculiar syntax which mighteven be considered wrong in the mouth of a foreigner. Example 4 givestoo little information on the context, making it hard for the learner tounderstand what is meant, and example 5 includes two proper names,presupposes a lot of general knowledge, and its metaphors make thesentence simply hard to understand. I do not think this kind of exampleis particularly useful.

With the examples retrieved from the Cobuild CD, learners benefit


from the identification of their sources, which provides them with somesupplementary pragmatic information. However, apart from the some-times difficult vocabulary and the problem of grasping the text’s topic onthe basis of only one sentence, what stands out from these examples isthat they have an author behind them, somebody expressing his or herpersonality. Still, what is probably welcomed in a magazine, newspaperor any other book, is supposed to be avoided in a reference work. Thisis why dictionary definitions, which should be impersonal, all seem to bewritten by one and the same person. A way in which a personality ex-presses itself is by infringing the rules, by dashing if only slightly thereader’s expectations with the use of an unusual piece of syntax, ametaphor, or a surprising collocate. The result is a number of sentencesthat are not always very clear for a foreigner. This does not mean thatno collocates can be deduced from these Cobuild examples; it meansthat the learner will not feel confident to deduce them from the exam-ples because the source is not totally trustworthy.

If some of the Grolier examples, on the other hand, are not imme-diately clear, learners can read as much of the context as they want, orthey can jump to the next example to solve their problem, since thereare so many of them. An encyclopaedia might not reflect the whole ofthe language in all its intricacies, but since it was not written to illustratethe use of particular words, the danger that these examples were madeup only to suit a lexicographer’s argument is inexistent.

***

Encoding is for advanced learners as difficult a problem as for begin-ning learners. Beginners have difficulty producing easy sentences, ad-vanced learners have difficulties producing difficult sentences. The toolsfor both can be improved.

Advanced learners’ look-up problems can be subdivided into twostages: the choice and usage of the item. These two steps are moreclearly distinguishable in the case of advanced learners because in manycases they are almost certain as to which item they want to use, and areonly unclear as to its usage.

As for the choice of the item, beginning as well as advanced learn-ers may want to solve their lexicographic problem in two different ways:via the source language or via the target language. If they start from the


language they know best, they will use a bilingual dictionary and willneed some help in choosing between the different alternatives. Labelsare best suited to disambiguate content words. Synonyms are able todistinguish quickly the different translations for a word if these refer toclearly distinct entities. Examples are less appropriate for distinguishingvarious translation options for the kind of word which advanced learnersneed. Indeed, infrequent words depend less on the co-text to be disam-biguated. Finally, definitions are useful to distinguish synonyms (modern-ise/upgrade), but not when different translation options are the result ofone word possibly indicating two completely different entities [lead(metal) and lead (guide)].

Not infrequently, advanced learners, accustomed to expressingthemselves and thinking in the target language, will have a fairly goodidea of the lexical item they need. A dictionary should allow them tofind an item starting from a few elements that are part of its definition. Itshould also offer the possibility of varying the register of a given word,changing expressions from congruent to metaphorical, and facilitatingthe use of fixed expressions.

One of the main challenges of an encoding dictionary is to turn pas-sive knowledge into active knowledge. In practice, this means to providethe learner with sufficient information on an item’s usage. This informa-tion can be given in two basic forms: explicit and implicit. Explicit in-formation on usage consists of grammatical information in its crudestform: rules. This is an appropriate method when the item’s grammaticalstructure has no influence on its meaning. If not, an example is a moreappropriate procedure. As for the issue of collocations, since advancedlearners have an extended passive knowledge, it will be easy for them torecognise the collocates they are looking for, if these are listed.

Another way of learning about the usage of a word is by means ofexamples. They are my personal preference. I distinguish three types:made-up, authentic and ‘controlled,’ and they each have their own uses.For advanced learners, made-up examples are not very adequate sincethey mostly teach one specific point, or only illustrate the definition.Authentic examples have the advantage of combining several kinds ofinformation but are sometimes confusing. ‘Controlled’ examples can befound in encyclopaedias and similar reference works33. They have the 33 I wrote some more on controlled examples in Humblé (1998).


advantage of being authentic, guaranteeing the register, providing theentire context, and being written in a clear and uncontroversial manner.


CONCLUDING REMARKS

In this book I have addressed a number of issues which I think are es-sential for improving dictionaries for foreign language learners. I arguedthat needs should drive the conception of a tool such as a dictionary, butwhen I situated foreign language dictionaries in the broader field ofhistorical lexicography, the relationship between needs and the toolssupposed to meet them showed that this relationship was no longer asclear as when dictionaries were first invented. Bilingual dictionaries stillfulfil an obvious need, but Baudrillard convinced me that not everythinghas necessarily a usage value, and that every object also functions in asymbolical circuit in which the token value predominates.

Over the centuries, monolingual native speaker’s dictionaries weregreatly influenced by ideological considerations and this has muddledthe relationship with their audience. As a result, learner's dictionaries,which have come to assist non-native speakers in learning a foreign lan-guage and were derived from native speaker’s dictionaries, have inher-ited some of the latter’s defects. They are still adaptations of the originalnative speakers’ dictionaries, instead of tools directly modelled on theanalysis of learner’s needs. At the same time, the needs of present-dayforeign language learners have changed. This change consists basicallyof an interest switch from merely understanding texts written in a foreignlanguage, to expressing oneself in that language.

An analysis of learners’ needs is an essential ingredient for anyproject that aims at improving the efficiency of foreign language learningtools. In order to better gauge these needs and the methods used to dis-cover them, I resorted to specialised literature on the subject. I realised


that part of this literature dealt with problems that modern technologyhad almost rendered obsolete. Another part of it dealt with what I con-sidered to be the right questions, but research on the matter did notseem to come to entirely convincing conclusions.

This was, in my opinion, largely due to the application of inade-quate research methods. It also meant that there was no consensus onwhat exactly had to be discovered. Reading Kuhn (1970), I realised thattheoretical lexicography lacks a clear awareness of the discipline’s foun-dations, and that the techniques used to acquire new knowledge wereepistemologically flawed. It is not enough to study ‘habits,’ if you wantto discover ‘needs.’ Additionally, Popper’s work (1994, 1995) con-vinced me that methods borrowed from natural sciences – currently thenorm – were inappropriate.

Indeed, the two methods used by researchers to discover learners’needs in terms of dictionaries are questionnaires and tests. Since theirresults are not entirely satisfactory and sometimes do not agree with myown experience, I concluded the matter should be tackled differently.Agreeing with Hilary Nesi (1996), I figured a qualitative approach was abetter way to deal with this kind of research. I decided therefore toprivilege introspection and close-reading.

In my research this expressed itself in two ways. When possible, Iasked learners about their experience with dictionaries. This was not al-ways a rewarding exercise, since a number of learners would answer theway they thought they were expected to answer, either by me or by so-ciety. This reflected secondarily the questionnaire situation and con-firmed to me that this methodology was indeed often unsuitable. It wasonly by ‘cross-examining’ my subjects –asking questions about whatthey effectively did– that I obtained a few interesting answers. More re-sults, however, were gained with a second method – examining diction-aries myself – , in an attempt to solve specific problems. It is in thesemoments of ‘réflexion jointe à l’usage’ that I had, I hope, a few ‘idéesnettes.’

In one particular case, I set out to analyse qualitatively a featurewhich I deem to be of the utmost importance in foreign language lexi-cography: examples. However, no agreement exists as to the best kind ofexample and over the last few years the issue has generated some con-troversy. This dispute was launched with the publication of the first Co-

CONCLUDING REMARKS 163

build dictionary in 1987. Because of the issue’s controversial nature –many tests, no conclusive results–, I thought it was an adequate topic todemonstrate how qualitative research could be carried out.

In this research, I investigated the nature of examples and theirpossible characteristics. I also took a critical look at the treatment givento examples in traditional and less traditional foreign language lexicog-raphy, bilingual as well as learner's. In both cases, I had to concludethat example policies still suffer from a few shortcomings, the main rea-son being that no clear distinction is made between encoding and decod-ing. In the absence of any clear idea of what examples are supposed todo, their choice remains rather random and learners miss out on one ofthe main forms of help a dictionary can provide. In terms of collocatesand syntax, examples do rather poorly in all of the dictionaries I investi-gated. The typical requirements of encoding learners are still not givendue consideration and suffer from a seemingly haphazard treatment.

Finally, I took a closer look at authentic examples in connectionwith the Cobuild experience, concluding that they were certainly usefuland indeed a revolution in the world of foreign language lexicography,but that their use should not become preached across the board. De-pending on the case, made-up examples may be more suited.

In the last part of this book, I sketch what I would consider to bethe ideal foreign language dictionary. An essential characteristic – andbasic requirement – of this new dictionary is the distinction between en-coding and decoding. Starting from this distinction, I discuss several as-pects of both processes. The case of decoding is easier because thecontext in which a hard word is found always helps comprehension.Even so, I discuss some problems that can arise in the course of a de-coding process. Polysemy is one of the most important ones and I hopeto have made a few helpful suggestions.

As for encoding, this is clearly a more difficult undertaking. Severalexpedients have been invented over the centuries to assist learners withencoding, and generations of lexicographers have dedicated themselvesto perfecting them. All this material should be re-used in a way that ismore adapted to present-day needs. Labels, synonyms, examples anddefinitions, all convey a particular kind of information but, dependingon the item, one is more useful than the other.

Furthermore, it is necessary to make a distinction between the en-


coding problems of beginners and of advanced learners. Beginners havea great number of grammatical problems which must be addressed, andthey often do not know exactly what to look up. Whereas it is the task oflanguage classes to teach macro-grammatical concepts, it is the task ofthe dictionary to show the grammatical constraints of specific words.Function words are in this aspect the most complex items and examplesare the most suitable way to teach them.

Encoding learners of an advanced stage, on the other hand, areconstantly in search of the right collocate, and are often in the dark as tothe appropriateness of the item they want to use. It is clear for me thatthere is still much to be done in the field of dictionaries. This work mustbe based on an analysis of advanced learners’ needs. In the section onadvanced encoding I have analysed a few of these needs and have sug-gested ways of meeting them. Encoding learners have at their disposalseveral different ways of obtaining the item they need. An ideal refer-ence tool could integrate various approaches and incorporate flexibility,greatly enhanced with electronic dictionaries.

With this book I intended to make a contribution to improving dic-tionaries, which I hope may have some practical consequence. In orderto have this kind of outcome, I am aware that much additional researchneeds to be carried out. More research is needed as to an item’s fre-quency and its best-suited kind of example, as well as on the relationfrequency/polysemy, a particular interest of mine. Moreover, studyingJapanese has convinced me that a number of problems go unnoticed ifwe are familiar with only one type of language –in my case, Indo-European. Many of the insights I personally had on lexicography weredue to this experience of dépaysement, which I recommend.

GLOSSARY 165

GLOSSARY

• Bilingual dictionary. A bilingual dictionary translates lexical itemsfrom one language into another. Depending on who is the user, a bi-lingual dictionary translates from an L1 into an L2 or from an L2into an L1. A normal bilingual dictionary has two possible audiences:the L1 of one audience is the L2 of the other.

• Bilingualised dictionary. A bilingualised dictionary is a kind of peda-gogical dictionary. It necessarily includes information in two lan-guages without being a bilingual dictionary in the traditional sense ofthe word. Often bilingualised dictionaries are a partial or total trans-lation of a monolingual learner’s dictionary. In some cases, the defi-nition of a word in a foreign language is given in the foreign languageand a translation in the language of the learner is added. In othercases, the definition is translated into the language of the learner.There are hybrid forms such as the Cobuild English-PortugueseBridge Bilingual Dictionary, where the definition is partly in Portu-guese and partly in English. In contrast with the normal bilingualdictionary, the bilingualised dictionary has a clearly defined audi-ence: those who speak the language into which the headwords or thedefinitions were translated.

• Cobuild. Abbreviation of “Collins Birmingham University Interna-tional Language Database.”

• Collocate. A collocate is a word which occurs very frequently withanother word so that the chance of both occurring together is veryhigh.

• Context. Context is the surroundings, in terms of meaning and notonly of words, of a lexical item. The context includes the co-text inso-far as it is specifically relevant to understand the meaning of a par-ticular lexical item. The context does not have to be linguistic andcan include the kind of medium in which a text was published or ut-tered.


• Corpus. A corpus is ‘a collection of naturally-occurring language text’(Sinclair on the “Corpus Linguistics Homepage” http:// www-clg.bham.ac.uk/glossary.html). In this book, I will refer mainly to theBank of English, corpus of Cobuild.

• Co-text is the immediate linguistic surroundings of a lexical item. Of-ten this co-text will indicate a nine-word span, four words on eachside of the word under consideration.

• Decode. To decode is to translate from an L2, target language or for-eign language, into an L1, source language, usually the mothertongue. Decoding is, in the context of this book, the process of un-derstanding a (usually) written text in a language which is not the de-coder’s L1. It is a commonly used term in lexicography and does notimply any specific linguistic theory on language as a code. It does notmean that when somebody reads or hears another language, they aredecoding. One is only decoding when one does not spontaneouslyunderstand the word in the L2 and has to look it up or go in searchof some kind of linguistic information in order to understand themessage.

• Encode. To encode is to translate from an L1 into an L2. Encoding isthe process of producing a text, written or spoken, in a language thatis not the encoder’s L1. This does not mean that when somebodyspeaks or writes another language, they are encoding. One is only en-coding when one does not spontaneously know the word in the L2and has to look it up or go in search of some kind of linguistic infor-mation to be able to do so.

• Fixed expression. A series of words people feel belong together andexpress one concept. I avoid using idiom in this sense, although thisterm is widely used to indicate a fixed expression. (See also idiomaticexpression.)

• Foreign language lexicography. By foreign language lexicography, Iunderstand all types of language reference works target non-nativespeakers as their audience. These reference works can be written inthe target language (L2), or include both the source (L1) and the tar-get (L2) language.

GLOSSARY 167

• Idiom (traditional definition). A group of words whose meaning can-not be predicted from the meanings of the constituent words, as forexample (It was raining) cats and dogs (Collins English Dictionary).Idioms are sometimes called fixed expressions or idiomatic expres-sions. There exists no consensus on this terminology and I give pref-erence to the term fixed expression.

• Idiom (Sinclair). Idioms are ‘semi-preconstructed phrases that con-stitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analys-able into segments’ (Sinclair, 1991:110) ‘The individual words whichconstitute idioms are not reliably meaningful in themselves, becausethe whole idiom is required to produce the meaning. Idioms overlapwith collocations, because they both involve the selection of two ormore words. At present, the line between them is not clear. In prin-ciple, we call co-occurrences idioms if we interpret the co-occurrenceas giving a single unit of meaning. If we interpret the occurrence asthe selection of two related words, each of which keeps some mean-ing of its own, we call it a collocation.’ (Sinclair, 1991:172)

• L1. The L1 is the source language, usually the learner’s mothertongue.

• L2. The L2 is the target language, usually a foreign language that alearner is in the process of mastering.

• Learner. A learner is someone who is in the process of mastering anL2. Any person using a dictionary in order to obtain information on alanguage other than his or her mother tongue is a ‘learner.’ Even ifpeople who consult dictionaries are not always doing this with theconscious purpose of learning, the fact is that they do learn and, con-sequently, at the moment in which they consult a dictionary, they arelearners.

• Learner’s dictionary. A learner’s dictionary defines the words of aparticular language in that same language for people for whom thislanguage is a foreign language. Learner’s dictionaries only exist forthe languages most studied by foreigners: English, French, Spanishand German. A learner’s dictionary aims at giving a more extensivetreatment to the most frequent words of a language, although these


‘most frequent words’ may include up to 90.000 lexical items(Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). Usually the vocabu-lary used in this kind of dictionary is ‘controlled.’ Only, say, the2,000 most frequent words are used in the definitions. Learner’sdictionaries have a negatively defined audience. They are not in-tended to be used by native speakers.

• Lexical item. A lexical item consists of at least one word but can con-sist of more than one. I use the term when I refer either to items in-cluding one or more words, or forms of words. Swimming pool, foundand at first glance are all single lexical items.

• Lexis. All the word-forms of a language.

• Monolingual dictionary. In this research, I consider two kinds ofmonolingual dictionaries: native speaker’s dictionaries and learner’sdictionaries.

• Multi-word item. A multi-word item is a group of words that refers toa single reality (e.g. operating table).

• Native speaker’s dictionary. A native speaker’s dictionary defines thewords of a particular language primarily for native speakers of thislanguage. Every complex society, in the anthropological sense of theword, has its own dictionary.

• Open-choice principle. The normal way of seeing language accordingto a ‘slot and filler’ principle. According to this principle, almost anyword can occur after any word, respecting syntactic constraints. (Sin-clair, 1991:109)

• Pedagogical dictionary. Pedagogical dictionaries are primarilyteaching materials and secondarily reference works. They are differ-ent from other kinds of dictionaries in that they are as much ‘tool’ as‘study material.’ They often concentrate on one particular area of thelexis of a language (e.g., business French). As a consequence, peda-gogical dictionaries are often published together with exercise mate-rial.

• Source language. The L1, usually the learner’s mother tongue.

GLOSSARY 169

• Target language. The L2, usually a foreign language that a learner isin the process of mastering.

• User. A user is a learner using a dictionary.

• Word. A word is anything between two white spaces.


APPENDIXES

Appendix 1 ‘Road’ 34

Cobuild I1. Cross the main road, then go on down the lane to the village.They took the road that led up the hill..the road from Belfast to Londonderry.She was studying a road map when I got back into the car.By road Luxembourg is about 225 miles from the ferry.The ancient ruins were accessible by road.2. There is an antique shop at the top of my road..the quiet Edgbaston road where he had lived for some thirty years.The museum was in a side street leading off from a road of shops.3. The hotel was just a little farther along the road.There are shops just down the road..her cousins from across the road.I was talking to Mr Marks from along the road..Janet from down your road.4.159, London Road.This is the Oxford road, and the Watford road turns off to the right.They crossed the Yugoslav border on the Budapest-Zagreb road.5. The number of road accidents was greatly reduced.6. I was again on the road, again at the wheel of the old blue sedan.I was stiff after seven hours on the road.7. It could well be the only one of its type still on the road.8. We’ll take the play for a few weeks on the road before it opens in London.9. She was well on the road to recovery.Surely you’re on the road to recognition, even if it’s only as head of department.10. New information is probably the surest road to new ideas.We have science and technology to help us along the road to peace and plenty.This is the first step on the road to victory.11. Let’s have one for the road before we go.

Cobuild21. There was very little traffic on the roads…We just go straight up the Bristol Road…He was coming down the road the same time as the girl was turning into the lane…Buses carry 30 per cent of those travelling by road…You mustn’t lay all the blame for road accidents on young people. 34 Bolds and italics are mine.

APPENDIXES 171

2. We are bound to see some ups and downs along the road to recovery.3. I was relieved to get back in the car and hit the road again.4. He still hoped someday to get a new truck and go back on the road.5. The government took another step on the road to political reform.…the stunning fashion pictures which launched unknown teenager Jane March onthe road to stardom.

Longman1. a busy roadat the end of the roadWe live just down the road.It takes three hours by road.Take the main road out of town and turn left at the first light.He was killed in a road accident.Kids of that age have no road sense.A road safety campaign.2. Maple Road.3. I’ve been on the road since 5:00 a.m. this morning.It costs a lot of money to keep these old cars on the road.4. It was this deal that set him on the road to his first million.5. You could move your pension to a private scheme, but I wouldn’t advise goingdown that road.

Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary1. The road to Bristol/the Bristol roadmain/major/minor roadsa quiet suburban road2. a road-map of Scotlandbe considerate to other road-users.3. 35 York Rd, London SW16.4. the Southampton Roads.5. all roads lead to Rome.6. It’s a long way by road – the train is more directIt’s cheaper to ship goods by road than by rail.7. get the show on the road.8. hit the road.9. one for the road.10. The band has been on the road for almost a month.11. the road to success/ruin.12. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.13. take to the road.

Oxford Wordpower1. Is this the right road to Beckley?


Take the London road and turn right at the first roundabout.Turn left off the main (= big, important) road.major/minor roads.If you get onto the ring road you’ll avoid the town centre.road signs.a road junction.a road-map of England.Bayswater Road, London.60 Marylebone Road, London.It’s going to be a terrible journey by road – let’s take the train.We were on the road for 14 hours.

APPENDIXES 173

Appendix 2 ‘Collocates in Cambridge and Cobuild2’

faceCambridge

They face/are faced with financial penalties.We’ll have to face her with this new information and see what she has to say.I can’t face climbing those stairs again.He’ll have to face the music when his parents find out he’s been missing school.Their houses face each other across the street.We’ll have to face the facts and start cutting costs.He thinks he would lose face if he admitted the mistake.She tried to save face by inventing a story about being overseas at the time.They gave him the title of company president as a face-saving gesture, although heno longer had any power.They agreed that there should be no attempts at face-saving.The hospital charges £4000 for a full facelift.The bank is planning to give its 1930s building a complete facelift.

collocate occ.down 0now 0let 0value 0look 0smile 0changes 0man 0see 0problems 0turned 0eyes 0across 0back 0off 0hands 0put 0still 0made 0looked 0total 0collocates/example 0/12=0

stopword occ.the 2to 4of 0a 3and 1in 0his 0‘s 0her 1on 0total 11stopwords/example 11/12=0.91


faceCobuild

He rolled down his window and stuck his face out.A strong wind was blowing right in my face.He was going red in the face and breathing with difficulty.She had a beautiful face.He was walking around with a sad face.The priest frowned in the light, his face puzzled.Harrer was one of the first to climb the north face of the Eiger.He scrambled 200 feet up the cliff face.The changing face of the British country side.This would change the face of Malaysian politics.Brothels, she insists, are the acceptable face of prostitution.With the collapse of communism, the ugly face of capitalism to some extent is ap-pearing again.England doesn’t want a war but it doesn’t want to lose face.To cancel the airport would be a loss of face for the present governor.Children have an almost obsessive need to save face in front of their peers.Can’t you see this could blow up in your face?You can criticise him until you’re blue in the face, but you’ll never change his per-sonality.All the time Stephen was lying face down and unconscious in the bath tub.Charles laid down his cards face up.No human being on the face of the earth could do anything worse than what he did.If a nuclear war breaks out, every living thing will be wiped off the face of theEarth.We were strolling into the town when we came face to face with Jacques Dubois.It was the first face to face meeting between the two men.Eventually, he came face to face with discrimination again.I was gradually being brought face to face with the fact that I had very little suc-cess.Scientific principles that seem to fly in the face of common sense.He said that the decision flew in the face of natural justice.The Prime Minister has called for national unity in the face of the violent anti-government protests.Roosevelt was defiant in the face of the bad news.With juveniles under eighteen, there’s little we can do. We can’t keep them incustody. They just laugh in your face.He came to me with a very long face.Opening the door, she made a face at the musty smell.Katrhyn pulled a face at Thomasina behind his back.On the face of it that seems to make sense. But the figures don’t add up.

APPENDIXES 175

It is, on the face of it, difficult to see how the West could radically change its posi-tion.Friends will see you are putting on a brave face and might assume you’ve got overyour grief.Scientists are putting a good face on the troubles.This Government has set its face against putting up income tax.If she shows her face again back in Massachusetts she’ll find a warrant for her ar-rest waiting.I felt I ought to show my face at her father’s funeral.What went through Tom’s mind I can’t imagine, but he did manage to keep astraight face.You have to wonder how anyone could say that seriously and with a straight face.Her opponent called her a liar to her face.Relief and gratitude were written all over his face.I could just see the pain written across her face.Stand up. Face the wall.He was hauled in to face the judge.Although your heart is breaking, you must face the truth that a relationship hasended.He accused the Government of refusing to face facts about the economy.I have grown up now and have to face up to my responsibilities.They were having to face up to the fact that they had lost everything.I couldn’t face the prospect of spending a Saturday night there, so I decided topress on.My children want me with them for Christmas Day, but I can’t face it.I couldn’t face seeing anyone.She was always attracted to younger men. But, let’s face it, who is not?Nothing gives a room a faster facelift than a coat of paint.The decision seems to be a face-saving compromise which will allow the govern-ment to remain in office.


Collocate occ.

down 1now 0let 0value 0look 0smile 0changes 0man 0see (1)problems 0turned 0eyes 0across 1back 1off 1hands 0put 0still 0made 1looked 0total 4collocates/example 4/66=0,06

stopword occ.

the 31to 14of 14a 11and 6in 10his 4‘s 0her 3on 5total 98stopwords/example 98/66=1.48

APPENDIXES 177

factCambridge

I’m not interested in hopes and plans, I just want you to tell me the plain/barefacts.Can I regard what you have just told me as fact?The play was closely based on fact.The fact is that they are the stronger team and are sure to win.No, I don’t work. In fact, I’ve never had a job.Have you always lived here? As a matter of fact I’ve only lived here for the lastthree years.Going bald is a fact of life.We are getting some facts and figures together and we will then have a full boardmeeting, and hopefully make a decision.

Collocates occ.

despite 0matter 1no 0very 0only 1some 1many 0people 0most 0think 0life 1even 0much 0(erm) 0never 1quite 0both 0finding 0remains 0women 0total 5collocates/example 5/8=0.62

stopword occ.

thein 1that 1is 2it 0was 0I 6he 0they 1are 3total 14stopwords/example 14/8=1.75.


factCobuild

His chances do not seem good in view of the fact that the Chief Prosecutor has al-ready voiced his public disapproval.Despite the fact that the disease is so prevalent, treatment is still far from satisfac-tory.No amount of encouragement can hide the fact that talking about very personal is-sues with a stranger is intimidating.In Rome, meeting him every morning, he soon became aware of the fact that Erterwas ill.My family now accepts the fact that I don’t eat sugar or bread.The fact that he had left her of his own accord proved to me that everything he’dsaid was true.We’ve had a pretty bad time while you were away. In fact, we very nearly split upthis time.He apologised as soon as he realised what he had done. In actual fact, he wrote anice little note to me.Mr Major didn’t go to university. In fact he left school at 16.That sounds rather simple, but in fact it’s very difficult.They complained that they had been trapped inside the police station, but in factmost were seen escaping over the adjacent roofs to safety in nearby buildings.Why had she ever trusted her? In point of fact she never had, she reminded her-self.A statement of verifiable historical fact.How much was fact and how much fancy no one knew.There is so much information that you can almost effortlessly find the facts foryourself.His opponent swamped him with facts and figures.The lorries always left for China in the dead of night when there were few witnessesaround to record the fact.The local people saw all the sufferings to which these deportees were subjected.And as a matter of fact, the local people helped the victims of these deportations.‘I guess you haven’t eaten yet.’ ‘As a matter of fact, I have,’ said Hunter.I know for a fact that baby corn is very expensive in Europe.I know for a fact that Graham has kept in close touch with Graham.The fact is blindness hadn’t stopped the children doing many of the things thatsighted children enjoy.I found that election rallies were being very poorly attended. But the fact of thematter is that they’re not terribly interested in this election.The fact remains, however you measure it, is unacceptably high.His admirers claim that he came to power perfectly legally, but the fact remainsthat he did so by exploiting an illegal situation.

APPENDIXES 179

We aren’t playing well as a team, and that’s a fact.He’s a dull writer and that’s a fact.‘I’m still staff colonel.’ — ‘Is that a fact?.’A UN fact-finding mission is on its way to the region.Stress is a fact of life from time to time for all of us.There comes a time when children need to know more than the basic facts of life.

collocates occ.

despite 1matter 3no 0very 3only 0some 0many 0people 0most 1think 0life 2even 0much 2(erm) 0never 1quite 0both 0finding 1remains 2women 0total 16collocates/example 16/31=0.51

stopword occ.

thein 6that 11is 4it 0was 2I 4he 3they 0are 0total 30stopwords/example 30/31=0.96


failedCambridge

I tried to persuade him to come, but I failed.She moved to London in the hope of finding work as a model, but failed.He failed dismally/miserably in his attempt to break the record.The two sides in the negotiation have failed to come to an agreement.She failed to reach the Wimbledon Final this year.He’s a failed writer.After two failed marriages, he is planning to marry for a third time.She has been given the task of sorting out the government’s failed taxation policy.He promised to help, but he failed to arrive on time.Her parents failed to understand that there was a problem.The club had been promised a grant from the council, but the money failed to ma-terialize.He never failed to take a disapproving stand at people who got divorced.He failed her when she most needed him.When I looked down and saw how far I had to jump, my courage failed me.‘Did you pass?’ ‘No, I failed.’I passed in history but failed in chemistry.The examiners failed him because he hadn’t answered enough questions.The brakes failed and the car crashed into a tree.After talking non-stop for two hours, her voice failed.The wheat failed last year because of the lack of rain.

Collocates occ.

because 2coup 0make 0last 1get 0any 0government 0win 0reach 1attempt 1take 1find 0far 0also 0having 0tried 1test 0

yesterday 0again 0even 0total 7collocates/example 7/28=0.25.

stopwords occ.to 6the 8have 1has 0that 0had 0he 6but 5they 0his 0total 26stopwords/example 26/20=1.3.

APPENDIXES 181

failedCobuild

The Worker’s Party failed to win a single governorship.He failed in his attempts to take control of the company.Many of us have tried to lose weight and failed miserably.The truth is, I’m a failed comedy writer really.We tried to develop plans for them to get along, which all failed miserably.After a failed military offensive, all government troops and police were withdrawnfrom the island.He failed to file tax returns for 1982.The bomb failed to explode.The lights mysteriously failed, and we stumbled around in complete darkness.In fact many food crops failed because of the drought.So far this year, 104 banks have failed.a failed hotel business.Here in the hills, the light failed more quickly.communities who feel that the political system has failed them.For once, the artist’s fertile imagination failed him.Their courage failed a few steps short and they came running back.

Collocates occ.because 1coup 0make 0last 0get 0any 0government 1win 1reach 0attempt 1take 1find 0far 1also 0having 0tried 2test 0yesterday 0again 0even 0total 8collocates/example 8/16=0.5.

Stopwords occ.to 4the 7have 2has 1that 1had 1he 2but 0they 0his 1total 19stopwords/example 19/16=1.18.


failCambridge

The reluctance of either side to compromise means that the talks are doomed tofail.You couldn’t fail to be saddened by the distressing reports on the famine victims.I fail to see what you’re getting at.I fail to see what this has to do with the argument.Be there by ten o’clock without fail.Every morning, without fail, she used to sit in the park and read her newspaper.A lot of people fail their driving test the first time.They had a track record of success and they never imagined the business couldfail.a fail-safe device/mechanism/system

Collocate occ.because 1see 2many 0people 1without 2make 0test 1often 0get 1even 0talks 1meet 0take 0understand 0might 0too 0safe 1likely 0

never 1succeed 0total 11collocates/example 11/9=1.2.

stopword occ.to 4if 0they 1that 0will 0you 1we 0but 0would 0not 0total 6stopwords/example 6/9=0.66.

APPENDIXES 183

failCobuild

He was afraid the revolution they had started would fail.Some schools fail to set any homework.We waited twenty-one years, don’t fail us now.It’s the difference between a pass and a fail.That’s how it was in my day and I fail to see why it should be different now.He attended every meeting without fail.On the 30th you must without fail hand in some money for Alex.Tomorrow without fail he would be at the old riverside warehouse.

Collocate occ.because 0see 1many 0people 0without 3make 0test 1often 0get 0even 0talks 0meet 0take 0understand 0might 0too 0safe 0likely 0never 0succeed 0total 5collocates/example 5/8=0.62.

Stopword occ.to 2if 0they 1that 0will 0you 1we 1but 0would 2not 0totalstopwords/example 7/8=0.87.


fadeCambridge

You’ll fade that tablecloth if you wash it in hot water.If you hang your clothes out in the bright sun, they will fade.He had a lovely suntan when he got back from his holiday, but it soon faded.They arrived home just as the light was fading.After his girlfriend left him, Bill faded from the picture/scene.The horse riders gradually faded from view/sight.Day slowly faded into night.The voice on the radio faded out.The children’s memories of their fathers slowly faded away.Hopes of saving the trapped miners are fading away fast.He was wearing a pair of faded jeans and an old T-shirt.A faded beauty is a woman who was beautiful in the past.

Collocate occ.away 2under 0began 0just 1beginning 0before 0never 0die 0hopes 1quickly 0soon 1begun 0flowers 0memories 1begins 0total 6collocates/example 6/12=0.5.

Stopword occ.to 0and 1will 1as 1out 1they 1into 1or 0then 0total 6stopwords/example 6/12=0.5.

APPENDIXES 185

fadeCobuild

All colour fades – especially under the impact of direct sunlight.No matter how soft the light is, it still plays havoc, fading carpets and curtains inevery room.fading portraits of the Queen and Prince Philip.a girl in a faded dress.faded painted signs on the sides do some of the buildings.Seaton lay on his bed and gazes at the ceiling as the light faded.The sound of the last bomber’s engines faded into the distance.They observed the comet for 70 days before it faded from sight.They watched the familiar mountains fade into the darkness.We watched the harbour and then the coastline fade away into the morning mist.She had a way of fading into the background when things got rough.The most prominent poets of the Victorian period had all but faded from the scene.Margaret Thatcher will not fade away into quiet retirement.Sympathy for the rebels, the government claims, is beginning to fade.Prospects for peace had already started to fade.fading memories of better days.Jay nodded, his smile fading.He thought her campaign would probably fade out soon in any case.You’ll need to be able to project two images onto the screen as the new one fadesin and the old image fades out.

Collocate occ.away 2under 1began 0just 0beginning 1before 1never 0die 0hopes 1quickly 0soon 1begun 0flowers 0memories 1begins 0total 8collocates/examples 8/19=0.42.

Stopword occ.to 2and 2will 1as 2out 2they 0into 5or 0then 1total 15stopwords/examples15/19=0.78


Appendix 3 ‘Proposal’

Monolingual learner’s dictionariesOxford Advanced Learner’s Dic-tionary (Second Edition)

a proposal for peaceproposals for increasing trade be-tween two countriesa girl who had five proposals in oneweek

Oxford Advanced EncyclopedicLearner’s Dictionary (UpdatedFourth Edition)

the proposal of new terms for a peacetreatya proposal for uniting the two compa-niesVarious proposals were put forwardfor increasing salariesa proposal to offer a discount toregular customersShe had had many proposals (of mar-riage) but preferred to remain single

Cobuild I

There is controversy about a proposalto build a new nuclear power stationThe two governments discussed aproposal for ending hostilitiesI heard about some proposals forcheaper flights to the United States

Cobuild2

The president is to put forward newproposals for resolving the country’sconstitutional crisis…the government’s proposals to abol-ish free health care…

The Security Council has rejected thelatest peace proposalAfter a three-weekend courtship,Pamela accepted Randolph’s proposalof marriage

Cambridge

Congress has rejected the latest eco-nomic proposal put forward by thepresidentThere has been an angry reaction tothe government’s proposal to reduceunemployment benefitHave you read Steve’s proposals forthe new project?There was anger at the proposal that aUN peace-keeping force should besent to the areaShe refused his marriage pro-posal/proposal of marriage


Bilingual dictionaries

Hazon-Garzanti

English-Italian

the proposal was never carried outto make a proposalshe had a proposal

Italian-English

proposal for the selection of an arbi-trator

Collins-Robert

French-English (proposition)

propositions de paix/peace proposalsà la proposition de/on the proposal of

English-French

proposals for the amendment of thistreaty

Collins German

German-English

to make somebody a proposalhis proposal of this plan surprised hiscolleagueshis proposal of John as chairman wasexpected

English-German (Vorschlag)

nothing

Collins Spanish

English-Spanish

proposal of marriageto make a proposalto make the proposal that

Spanish-English

nothing

Oxford-Hachette

French- English (proposition)

faire des propositions concrètes: tomake concrete proposalsproposition technique/commerciale:technical/business proposal

English-French

to make/put forward a proposal fairea proposal for changesa proposal for doing ou to dothe proposal that everybody shouldget a pay riseto receive a proposal

Oxford-Duden

English-German

make proposals formake a proposal for doing sth or tohis proposal for improving thedraw up proposals/a proposalproposal [of marriage]he was interrupted in the middle ofhis proposal to her/the committee

German-English

a conciliatory proposal

Oxford Spanish


English-Spanish

to put or make a proposal to sb.

Spanish-English

proposal of marriage

New Proceed

make a proposal for peaceHis proposal to put off the meetingwas rejectedReluctantly she accepted their pro-

posal that she should be operated onHe made a proposal of marriage toher

Taishukan’s Genius

make [offer] proposals for peaceWe accepted a proposal to repair [forrepairing, that we (should) repair] aroadreceive a proposal (of marriage) fromhimhe made a proposal to her

BIBLIOGRAPHY 189

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