Workbook on Lexicography (review)

Reviews257 flaws should be emended as well. E.g., English ass does not have a central meaning 'donkey' and a special one 'buttocks'; the first word is indirectly borrowed from Lat. asinus 'donkey', the other goes back to OE ears. English legal cannot be simply explained by lawful, (p. 134), because they are not full synonyms. Nor can one simply say that cute is 'short for acute' (p. 135), because of the difference of meaning. Misprints are not too numerous; more difficult ones are, e.g. (p. 147), Russian prevraschaht instead of prevrashchat; (p. 179), Sanskrit ekkarthya instead of ekaarthya; (p. 21 1), where Cassidy's article became a part of somebody else's bibliographical item. These are minor flaws, however, which do not detract from the basic usefulness of the book. Ladislav Zgusta University of Illinois Workbook on Lexicography. By Barbara Ann Kipfer, with a Glossary of English Lexicographical Terms by Jennifer Robinson, and Martin, L. Jeffries and A. P. Cowie. Volume 8 of the Exeter Linguistic Studies. Exeter: University of Exeter, 1984. 218 pp. $6.39. When five years ago I and my former colleague on the Middle English Dictionary, Mr. David Jost (now of the American Heritage Dictionary) undertook to teach a course on dictionary making, we at once discovered that there was very little instructional material available in print, and like others who have taught similar courses, we devoted much time to selecting readings, culling examples from dictionaries, compiling bibliographies, and, especially, developing exercises. The recent appearance of several 258Reviews instructional texts, among which is the subject of this review, is very welcome indeed, and will surely encourage more courses in English lexicography as well as the treatment of lexicography in courses in related areas. The Workbook is a collaborative effort. In addition to the instructional text and exercises produced in the main by Barbara Ann Kipfer, it includes a glossary of lexicographical terms by Jennifer Robinson (which readers of this journal will have had opportunity to examine in the 1983 volume), and a selection of bibliographies, one keyed to the glossary, and two providing listings of the dictionaries and secondary works cited in Workbook proper. The bibliographies are not arranged according to individual topics or to the material presented in individual chapters. The instructional text itself is divided into three parts: "recording," "description," and "presentation." The first part includes five chapters. The introductory chapter provides a brief history of the development of the English dictionary and a review of the kinds of information included in a typical entry and the various ways prominent dictionaries present that information. Chapter two discusses how the dictionary differs from other reference works which provide information about words. Chapter three treats the decisions required in the limiting of a dictionary's corpus and the sources the lexicographer draws upon in creating his book. Chapter four discusses in more detail the kinds of information a dictionary can provide, both lexical and encyclopedic, and the fifth chapter examines the process of gathering and testing the data, and the importance of that process for the editing tasks. The second part of the text begins with five chapters devoted to definition, the first a general discussion and the following four devoted respectively to definition of nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives, and function words and "multiword lexical units." This part also contains chapters on presentation of spelling and pronunciation, on etymology and on usage. Part three of the text includes a chapter discussing the technical issues involved in the physical presentation of the Reviews259 material and how the several tasks involved in the production of the dictionary are organized, and concludes with a very interesting chapter on the contributions which the computer may make to producing and studying dictionaries. This division of the text seems to me appropriate to the disparate purposes which students bring to a course on lçxicography. The course usually has to treat both "how to do" the dictionary and how the dictionary "is done"; that is, some students are interested primarily in the process of analyzing language as that is done for a dictionary, and others, especially librarians and students of education, want to learn how effectively to use and...