How to Achieve Lexicographic Virtue Through Selective and Judicious Sinning

How to Achieve Lexicographic Virtue Through Selective and Judicious Sinning James D. McCawley Wierzbicka objects to the redundancy oftheLongman Dictionary of the Englhh Language (LDOTEL) definition (la) of weapon and suggests that it would be an improvement to eliminate the first clause entirely, yielding (lb): (1) a. weapon—an instrument of offensive or defensive combat; something to fight with b. weapon—something to fight with There is a problem with (lb), however, namely the ambiguity of with among the senses 'using', 'accompanying', and 'against', and the superfluous clause of (la) succeeds in eliminating that ambiguity: something is needed to specify which sense of with is intended,1 and the word instrument accomplishes that, though that could have been done more compacdy, e.g., by recasting the definition as 'an instrument used for fighting'. The same goal could have been accomplished through a cross-reference to the entry for with, e.g., 'something to fight with3', if definition 3 under with is the one for the instrument sense of with. The problem that this example brings out is that whatever distinctions among senses are drawn in the entry for a given word also need to be drawn in definitions in which that word appears, and lexicographers have not developed conventions for distinguishing among the senses of the words that figure in their definitions. Much of the redundancy that Wierzbicka finds in existing dictionaries is the result of stopgap measures to avoid ambiguities in definitions that would be accurate and elegant ifextraneous senses ofthe component words were somehow excluded. Many of the cases of circularity that Wierzbicka cites have the appearance of circularity only because no overt distinction is made How to Achieve Lexicographic Virtue ...121 among different senses of words. For example, she criticizes the Oxford Paperback Dictionary's (OPD) definitions offate and destiny for circularity:2 (2) a. fate 1. a person's destiny 2. a power thought to control all events and impossible to resist b. destiny 1 . that which happens to a person or thing thought of as determined by fate But here the OPD is not defining/ate in terms of itself: it is defining fatex in terms offate2. The objections that I would raise to its definitions forfate are quite different from the charge of circularity that Wierzbicka raises. First, the OPD defines the one sense offate in terms of the other surreptitiously rather than openly; it would have been much clearer to definefate¡ as 'what happens to (a person or thing) because of fate2', which would also have brought out the connection between the two senses. Second, the definitions ignore entirely two important differences betweenfatex and destiny¡, namely that the one generally refers to bad things that happen to one (as in cruel fate) while the other takes in mainly good things (*cruel destiny), and that a person's fate is viewed retrospectively while his destiny is viewed prospectively : one speaks of the cruel fate of the residents of Pompeii who died in the eruption of Vesuvius, but not of their destiny. Third, the OPD does not make clear that the two senses offate fit into different syntactic frames: fate¡ requires a "possessive" noun phrase (whether in the form NP'sfate orfate of NP is immaterial), whereas fate2 does not allow such a phrase and indeed, even though written with a lower-case initial , behaves syntactically as a proper name (e.g., it takes no article). In my suggested revision of the OPD definition ('what happens (to a person or thing) because offate2'), I have used parentheses to indicate an entity that may or must be referred to separately (here, as the "possessive" NP), using a notation developed byJeffrey Gruber (1965) in his treatment of the role of the lexicon in mediating the relationship between semantic structure and syntactic form: one of Gruber's uses for parentheses (which he combines in various ways with the horizontal line that indicates what semantic elements are "incorporated into" a given lexical item) is to specify material that, if present in the semantic structure, could be given a separate syntactic realization.3 A definition has to indicate in some way how the entities that it refers to relate to...