Lexicology and corpus linguistics: An introduction (review)

This textbook deals with lexicology and corpus linguistics—two new fields of mainstream linguistics. It contains four articles, and starts with a survey of lexicology (1–22) written by M. A. K. Halliday. The author first tries to define and understand word as a ‘unit’ of language. Then he examines the relevance of lexicology in dictionary and thesaurus preparation. He explores the history of lexicology practiced in India, China, the Islamic world, and Europe. He studies diachronically the evolution of dictionaries and thesauruses in England and highlights some recent developments. Finally, he argues that dictionaries and thesauruses are the best resources for information on lexicology at both diachronic and synchronic levels.

In the article entitled ‘Words and meaning’ (23–71), Collin Yallop makes a survey of lexicology to explore the conceptual interface underlying words and meaning. He defines the role of etymology and prescription in the process of lexical cognition, and builds up a network of relations between language and meaning with regard to social life and tradition. Next, he examines some common misconceptions about language and meaning, and estimates contributions of Ferdinand de Saussure and John Rupert (J. R.) Firth to the field. Finally, he defines the phenomenon of meaning variation across languages to attest to the importance of word meaning in translation.

In ‘Language and corpus linguistics’ (73–112), Wolfgang Teubert addresses a few questions about the domain of lexicology. In subsequent sections, he examines the position of word meaning in standard linguistics and defines the notion of word, idiom, and collocation. Finally, he presents a brief history of corpus linguistics to look at language from a different perspective.

Wolfgang Teubert and Anna Cermáková, in ‘Directions in corpus linguistics’ (113–65), propose to study lexicology through corpora. They introduce some basic notions about a corpus (e.g. text representation, corpus typology, and so on) and explore the relevance of meaning in discourse. They propose to retrieve word meaning from usage and argue for the use of information from corpora. Finally, they highlight the value of collocation, translation, and parallel corpora to examine the process of conceptualization of word meaning.

To understand the nature of language the contributors use various empirical, cognitive, and communicative models, and they refer to functional theories of language from the viewpoint of systemic functional linguistics. The volume contributes to mainstream linguistics in various ways: it integrates discourse and description of natural texts, explores relationships between linguistics and neighboring disciplines (e.g. psychology, sociology, philosophy, and literary studies), and argues to apply the resulting knowledge base in education, language pathology, and law. The book makes an important contribution to the reintroduction of ‘traditional openness’ in the study of language. It provides enough valuable information about lexicology and corpus linguistics to be considered as a textbook.