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INTERTEXTUALITY and the DICTIONARY: TOWARD A DECONSTRUCTIONIST ACCOUNT OF LEXICOGRAPHY William Frawley 1. Introduction The purpose of this paper is to give a philosophical account of the dictionary from the standpoint of post-structural, deconstructionist, literary criticism. The motivation for looking at the dictionary in this manner is that while linguists and lexicographers have devoted a great amount of attention to the structure of the dictionary, few researchers, if any, have concerned themselves with the dictionary simply as a phenomenon, or, more specifically, as a written phenomenon. Granted, there have been sociological studies of the dictionary —the book as a social phenomenon (e.g., McDavid, 1979; Malkiel, 1980; Baker, 1972)—but these studies are, if the circularity can be pardoned, sociological, and thus they center on the role of the dictionary in society, not on the dictionary itself as a textual phenomenon. Recent deconstructionist literary criticim, however, with its focus on looking at literature (indeed, all knowledge) as texts, can provide us with a theoretical vocabulary for explaining the textual phenomenon (embedded in other textual phenomena) that our culture conventionally calls a "dictionary." Work by Barthes (1979), Culler (1981, 1982), Derrida (1974, 1978), Leitch (1983), and Kristeva (1980), and the excellent essays to be found in Harari (1979) and Spanos, Bové, and O'Hara (1982) give us the philosophical foundations for a theory of texts that can account for lexicography as a form of writing and thus explaining the dictionary as the product of a certain kind of written activity in much the same way as history, philosophy, and physics are explained as written activities that engender texts for the disciplinary canon (see, e.g., White, 1973; Rorty, 1978; Foucault, 1972). In the essay that follows, I will make no attempt to spell out post-structuralist criticism in its entirety; I do so not out of sadism for those unfamiliar with the deconstructionist project, 1 Intertextuality and the Dictionary but, in fact, out of sympathy, since the literature on the subject is too vast and often too idiosyncratically technical to give the project a fair (pardon the pun) writing. Instead, I will explain the assumptions and claims of deconstructionism as I go along and give only those points relevant to the explanation of the dictionary as a written phenomenon. (The interested reader is enjoined to consult Leitch, 1983, or Culler, 1982, for excellent introductions to the full project.) 2. The Dictionary as Writing The deconstructionist project is to look at all texts as the consequence of a more general activity called "writing" (écriture). Barthes (1979) and Derrida (1974) have gone to great pains to articulate the features of this more general activity, and Derrida's commentary is perhaps the most lucid: Now we tend to say 'writing' for all that and more: to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible; and also, beyond the signifying face, the signified face itself. And thus we say 'writing' for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural 'writing' .... All this to describe not only the system of notations secondarily connected with these activities but the essence and content of these activities themselves (Derrida, 1974:9). Writing is anything that contributes to the production of an inscribed sign, but it is viewed as faceless (see Foucault, 1979), authorless, a historically conditioned activity that has as its by-products the objects that we call "texts." Writing is, furthermore, primary in a literate culture; this is related to what Derrida (1974) calls "logocentrism," or the Western rationale that meanings are primary and that signs serve only William Frawley to express them. The practical consequence of such a project for, at least, literary criticism is that one no longer looks at literature in authorial/biographical terms (since the author exists only as his/her texts), in classic aesthetic terms (since aesthetics is also just another way of writing and thus has no a priori value in judging a text), or in terms...

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