The Lexicography of English: From Origins to Present

ISBN-13: 9780198299677 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 544 str.

Henri Bejoint

Opis

This book looks at how English words have been recorded, ordered, dissected, and displayed in dictionaries in Great Britain and the USA from the seventeenth century to the present. In the process it offers a complete introduction to how dictionaries are made. It considers the aims of their authors, the methods of their compilation, and the concepts and beliefs that lie behind them.

Henri Bejoint compares the descriptive approach of English lexicography with its more prescriptive American
counterpart, and contrasts both with the lexicography of France. Computers have transformed the way dictionaries are produced and presented. Yet, as the author shows, many aspects of lexicography have hardly changed over the
centuries: the challenge of distinguishing a word's senses, for example, and of tracing the history of its forms and
uses. Problems equally remain: how to treat taboo-words and insults is as difficult as it ever was and the nature of meaning is subject still to fierce debate.

The history of lexicography is characterized by the ambitions and achievements of great eccentrics and yet
greater intellects. Johnson, Webster, and Murray stalk these pages with a host of scholars and enterpreneurs: Professor Bejoint vividly documents their lives and deftly takes apart their work. "Dictionaries are an endless source of enjoyment," he writes, "and perhaps the most important object of this book is to try to persuade the reader that
lexicography is a fascinating domain."

He triumphantly succeeds.
"

Recenzje

magisterial review of the lexicography of English...Henri Béjoint has produced a scholarly account of English lexicography that ranges broadly across the field. Dictionaries are "mouthpieces of a culture"; Béjoint shows how we have codified our culture in our dictionaries.

O autorze

Henri Béjoint is Professor Emeritus at the University of Lyon. In 1997-8 he was President of the European Association for Lexicography. He has published extensively on lexicography in French and English, including Tradition and Innovation in Modern English Dictionaries (OUP 1994) and, with Richard Wakely, French Usage (OUP 1996). With Phillippe Thoiron he is co-editor of Les Dictionnaires Bilingues (Duculot 1996) and Le Sens en terminologie (Presses Universitaires de Lyon 2000) and, with François Maniez, of De la mesure dans les termes (Presses Universitaires de Lyon 2005).