Wörterbücher. Dictionaries. Dictionnaires (review)

Reviews127 Wörterbücher. Dictionaries. Dictionnaires. [International Encyclopedia of Lexicography.] Ed. Franz Josef Hausmann, Oskar Reichmann, Herbert Ernst Wiegand, and Ladislav Zgusta. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Vol. 1 (1989), lii + 1056 pp.; vol. 2 (1990), xxiv + 1281 pp. $463.00 U.S. Of the impressive series of handbooks devoted to major subdisciplines of linguistics those proposed for the International Encyclopedia—on dialectology, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, ' and computer linguistics —have appeared in the course of the past eight years; the present state of planning goes as far as no. 13 (with philosophy of language, syntax, semiotics, linguistic disorders and pathologies, writing and written language, morphology , onomastics, and languages for specific purposes still to come). It is an indication of the accepted status of lexicography as a scholarly discipline (to which status the editors of this work have contributed decisively) that the series includes Dictionaries as one of the first sets. Three volumes on dictionaries are planned; of these the first two, comprising 219 articles in 20 chapters, have been published to date (by July 1991) and will accordingly be reviewed here. A comparison of the published volumes with the undated (1985?) outline sent to contributors ("Konzeption des Handbuches," in its German version ) shows a few changes in scope: the number of articles for the three volumes was increased from 301 to 350; among them 15 numbered a, b appear to be last-minute additions, some of these written to complement chapters that proved not to be as comprehensive as the editors had envisaged. The first volume (seven chapters) starts, as it should, with more general aspects of the discipline: chapters 1-2 Lexicography and society (articles 1-25), 3 History and theory of lexicography (26-35), 4-5 Theory of monolingual lexicography (36-90a), and 6-7 pictionary types (91-100); "Dictionary types" is also the covering title ofthe first chapters in the second volume: 8-15 (101-66). A short chapter, "Procedures in Lexicographical Work" (16, 16773a ), leads on to the lexicography of individual languages: chapter 17 Classical languages (articles 174-80), 18 Romance languages (181-91), 19 Germanic languages (192-207), and 20 Slavic languages (208-19), which closes volume 2. The third volume will have 60 further articles on still other languages , more on theory and method, and a bibliography and indexes. It is obviously not possible in one review to discuss 2 19 articles, each summarizing the research in the field and each covering many dictionaries. I will therefore select what is of particular methodological interest and will be guided by personal preferences and expected interests of international users of the handbook, but will in the main restrict myself to summarizing contents. The sociological functions of dictionaries range from their standardizing impact through academies from the 17th century onwards (article 1, pages 1-19) to various responses by individual communities, situated "be- 128Reviews tween fascination and boredom" (19), but the "authority" of dictionaries in matters of correctness is now widely accepted in Western societies (2If). This impact has always been felt in Britain, but even more so in the United States (as John AJgeo aptly summarizes it in articles 3 and 4 concentrating on the mass media). Social and political aspects of lexicography have an old tradition in the Francophone world, leading up to recent legislation onfranglais, in dictionaries and elsewhere (5-6, 38-62). Whatever the views of the enlightened descriptive compilers, many users will expect guidance on what is right and wrong. A dictionary is, then, an important instrument for developing a lexical norm (Yakov Malkiel, 7, 63-70; cf. Martha RipfePs 24, 189-207) in the genesis of the standard language (Ladislav Zgusta, 8, 70-79), and as an expression of ideologies (9, 79-88). While all these surveys are intended to be universally relevant, they draw their data from the great Western European traditions. The users and uses are the focus of attention in articles 12-15: different types of people will use a dictionary for different purposes, which means that the optimum of usefulness and readability must be ensured by correlating expectations with lexicographical possibilities. Literary works or texts analyzed by the philologist present problems that are so specific that...