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PROGRESS IN BILINGUAL LEXICOGRAPHY DURING THE RENAISSANCE Douglas A. Kibbee A comparison of the use of examples in Renaissance bilingual lexicography provides an interesting view of the delimitation of the boundaries between grammar and lexicography and thus of the development of lexicography as a science. The lexicographer must assume some knowledge of the grammar on the part of the user, or else the mass of morphological, syntactic, and semantic information that must be included about each word becomes too lengthy to be practical. The dictionary of John Palsgrave, in his Lesclaircissement de la langue francoyse (1530), and that of Claude de Sainliens, the Dictionarie French and English (1593), differ in their use of examples to illustrate the meanings and uses of the words they include, and these differences reflect the different conceptions the authors had of the use of the bilingual dictionary and of the relationship between grammar and lexicography. In the case of these two dictionaries, the authors could have rather fixed notions of the grammatical knowledge of the user, for the dictionaries were, in the case of Palsgrave, combined with the grammar in a single volume, and in the case of de Sainliens, clearly a companion piece to his treatises on grammar. For Palsgrave, the dictionary is the part of his work destined for the mastery of an active skill, composition: To thentent that after the lernar can by helpe of the sayde first boke/ pronounce this frenche tong truely/ and by meanes of the seconde/ with the frenche vocabulyst (whiche shal folowe whan the thirde boke with his tables is completely finisshed) understande any authour that writeth in the sayd tong by his owne study without any other teacher. He maye also by the helpe of this thirde boke and tables therunto belongyng/ knowe howe to speke any sentence/ or truely and parfitely to endyte any mater in 21 22Renaissance Bilingual Lexicography the same tong . . . (Ill.i.r). The third book includes further commentary on the grammatical rules presented in the second book along with the "tables" arranged alphabetically by part of speech. Everything, Palsgrave hopes, is provided in this enormous tome to permit the student to express himself in French. For this reason, Palsgrave's dictionary is monodirectional, English to French. He hints, in the quotation above, that he hoped to prepare a French-English "vocabulyst" after finishing the third book, with its English-French tables. As far as we know, it was never completed. The only other known work by Palsgrave is a Latin play, Acolastus, for use as an aid in teaching Latin. For de Sainliens, the dictionary is an instrument of a passive skill, comprehension: Having alreadie (gentle Reader) for thine ease and facilitie in attaining of our French tongue, set foorth my Bookes De pronunciatione linguae gallicae, & French Littleton, wherby I have opened the way to all sorts as well learned as unlearned, for the perfect reading and pronunciation thereof: and yet perceiving thy want and indigence of a sufficient meane for the understanding of the same, I have now for thy further availe, published this my present worke [the dictionary], whereby for the most part, thou maiest be satisfied ([1593] Claudius Holliband, to the Students of the French tongue, recto). Since comprehension and not composition is the goal of his work, the dictionary is monodirectional, French to English. Progression to the next stage, composition, is the goal of his book on verb conjugations, although this must have seemed meager help to those students trying to express themselves in French. A far greater problem for composition than conjugation is differences in complementation and collocation. Douglas A. Kibbee23 What types of information do these lexicographers provide? First, let us consider the morphological information. For adjectives, de Sainliens notes no variants, listing only the masculine singular form of the adjective. Palsgrave regularly gives the masculine and feminine, singular and plural forms. For nouns, de Sainliens almost always indicates the gender, either by the abbreviation m. for masculine or / for feminine, or by use of an article, usually the indefinite article since this is clearest for gender marking in French, or occasionally by the partitive or even definite article. Palsgrave also notes gender (by abbreviation...

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