Navigating Entries for Polysemous Words: Learning from Learners' Dictionaries

Navigating Entries for Polysemous Words: Learning from Learners' Dictionaries u; Wendalyn Nichols New York City [sers of dictionaries for native speakers of English are accustomed to seeing long, dense columns of unjustified text at entries for polysemous words — and, for the most part, ignoring them. The more curious among us might tackle the verb set in a historical dictionary to discover the origins of the use of setin "set yourself down," but we are unlikely ever to look up the phrase "set the table," wondering why it is not "make the table." A learner of English, however, needs the answers tojust such questions. Until die early 1990s, learners' dictionaries were only marginally less impenetrable than those for native speakers, and that only because the archaic and more obscure meanings were not accounted for in them. The entry for set (including homographs for different parts of speech, and phrasal verbs) in the first edition of the Longman Didionary ofContemporary English (LDOCE) still took up nearly a page and a half of tighdy set print, its presentation made even more daunting by elaborate grammatical coding. With the advent of corpus-based lexicography in the 1980s, a new generation of lexicographers working in Britain began to rethink the way information was presented to the learner. Codes were simplified , restrictive defining vocabularies were refined, and more sentential styles of definitions were developed. And the problem of navigating longer entries began to be addressed in new ways. I would like to trace the evolution of one of those methods as it occurred during my years as a lexicographer with Longman (1992-1997), using for illustration entries for die word order. Dictionaries:Journal ofthe Dictionary Soaety ofNorth American (2006), 162-167 _________________Learning from Learners' Dictionaries163 When Ijoined die company, work was finishing on the Longman LanguageActivator (1993), a tool unlike any diat had been published before . Organized semantically, the ,Activator focused on core words and phrases. The user could look up a word alphabetically, index-style: if the entry for that word was not in that alphabetical run, the index sent the user to the semantic group where the entry could be found. For instance , the listing for option sent the user to the entries for choose and deal with. In diis way, it functioned like a thesaurus. Something more needed to be done for high-frequency polysemous words, however, and die team came up witii die idea of putting boxes at these entries that acted as maps for locating the right meaning. Below is the entry for order from Activator. 164Wendalyn Nichols As can be seen from the illustration, at the listing for order, the user finds a box that says "Which meaning?" It then lists four short definitions , which are followed by arrows giving the location of the meaning the user wants; these are reproduced below: order someone to do something => tell/order SB to do sth order in which things happen, are placed etc. => order/ sequence organize something => organize ask for something => ask for sth/ask sb to do sth At each of the main entries, another box maps the semantic groupings. At order/sequence, for instance, there is a short definition — 'the fixed and regular way that a number of things or events happen or are arranged' — followed by a list of five semantic groupings; these are reproduced below: 1.words meaning an order 2.to be in the correct order 3.doing things one after the other 4.to be in the wrong order 5.ways of saying that something is done in the wrong order Each grouping, in turn, has a box that lists the words and phrases being defined. At "words meaning an order," five words are defined: order, sequence, cycle, rota, and pattern. The box idea worked well for the Activator, but could it translate to a more traditional dictionary? As we worked on the third edition of the LongmanDictionary ofContemporaryEnglish (LDOCE 3) , we tried mapping words like run and set. We found we could group meanings semantically and put a navigational box at the beginning of the entry, although this was not without its problems. For one thing, we ended up with a miscellaneous category called other...