Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of English

Introduction to Linguistics

Fall 2004

Week 14: Answers for Singleton, Chapter 10

1. What is a dictionary?

Maybe the simplest way to think about what they dictionary is as to liken it to a mental lexicon on paper. Dictionaries in the modern world seek to provide the user with a "full range" of information about the words of a language. As we conceive our own studies Alexis this is probably an extremely difficult thing to do particularly in a paper dictionary, but this is what dictionary uses expect nowadays. The history of dictionary making, however, tells a rather different story. When people first started making monolingual dictionaries, that is dictionaries to be used by native speakers of a certain language, such as an English-English dictionary, their main purpose was to try to provide what they thought was good forms of language for the reader. Thus, early dictionaries only included a small number of words chosen by the author or editors which they felt the readers should know. Looking at this we can see that early dictionaries were extremely prescriptive. This means the main purpose of these early dictionaries was to tell people what was good language, or at least good words, and to show them how to use these words. We still have tools like this, but they're not usually thought of as dictionaries. They are usually called things like 'vocabulary builders', or 'test preparation books'. It was not until the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), published first in the mid 19th-century that a dictionary sought to include all the different words in the English language. The OED tried to be descriptive and not prescriptive, for the first time for an English language dictionary.

Since the OED dictionaries have tended to be purely descriptive and try to be much less prescriptive, and in doing so have sought to explain actual patterns of usage related to words in a language. The speakers of English often used dictionaries to look up the meanings of certain words they encounter when they read or simply to find the spelling of words that they can pronounce but cannot spell when they want to write them. Some dictionaries eventually become rather encyclopaedic in that they include lots of information which is not necessarily considered linguistic, such as information that famous places, famous people or things that famous people have said. In addition, learners dictionaries have become quite common for non-native speakers who are trying to figure out how to use the target language.

2. What are some of the major problems in trying to write a dictionary?

As it is always been a major problem in trying to write a dictionary is deciding what to include. First people have to consider how many words and what type of words and how the going to break the words down, i.e., morphological variants. Following that, dictionary writers need to them try to consider how much information the going to include about each word and specifically which types of information. Certainly one will have to include definitions but what types of definitions, for their many different ways and defining a word. Some dictionaries are what are termed etymological, which means that they show the origins of the words and the way that the word changed overtime. Other dictionaries are careful to show different usages of words. This means they have lots of different examples in the form of sentences. Still other dictionaries show, at least a limited extent, collocational patterns.

It should also be born in mind that words are always variants. That is there's no perfect form for any one word. Thus, words have tremendous amount of different variant pronunciations, and may even have variant spellings. Additionally, words do not have fixed meaning. Rather, they have very many different meanings. We found out in this course that all words are polysemous and the dictionary must somehow find a way to deal with this phenomenon in language. Another issue the dictionary's need to deal with is that this variation is also constantly changing so the dictionary maker has to make sure that they have the most up-to-date information on the words behavior in order to make their dictionary as valid as possible. This is not an easy process.

3. What are some of the different ways of teaching lexis in the language classroom?

A major distinction and teaching of lexis is often made between an overt and a covert approach and the degree to which the teacher will mix these two. It is generally recognized that students will manage to pick up vocabulary if it occurs in context (here context generally means reading contexts). It is equally recognized that thinking of vocabulary in context often does not happen. Thus, many teachers resort to overtly teaching the vocabulary items that they think their students need to acquire. No mysteries here. This is basically just having students memorize words from a list, or flashing card pictures and words on them. Therefore, most teachers tend to mix these two basic approaches, usually favoring one over the other as a general approach.

4. How does lexical learning relate to other areas of language learning?

This is the million dollar question. After many many years of neglect in relation to the area of lexis and the impact of lexis on total language learning, since the 1990s there has been a renewed, or better stated in new interest in the impact of lexis on the language as a whole. As a result a small but determined group of researchers, donned lexicalists, have emerged who claim that lexis has a very important impact on the language is a whole. In fact, they would claim that lexis is the very basis of all language systems and all other linguistic systems are somehow tied together through lexis. In this view lexis is at the core of our language ability. Everything that this it doesn't make a lot of sentence. Words are reflected at all levels. Lexicalists even claim that the entire syntactic system is embedded within the mental lexicon. Such findings come as a result of studies on idioms and collocation and everything in between. They see chunks as being the basis of our syntactic knowledge.

If the lexicalists are proven right, then language teachers, especially second foreign language teachers are going to have to drastically alter the methods they use to teach their language. Even if the lexicalists are only partly right, there's still things in their claims which need to be considered and current approaches to the teaching of foreign languages still should be altered to a certain extent to incorporate some of these ideas. Students need more practice with lexis.