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Reviews205 English Dictionariesfor Foreign Learners: A History. 1999. A. P. Cowie. Oxford : Clarendon Press. Pp. xiii + 232. $72.00 A;. P. Cowie's overview of the genesis and development of dictioncaries specially written for non-native speakers of English is meticulously researched, his commentary supported with a wealth of detail in the best scholarly tradition — that is, as far as the commentary goes. Mr. Cowie declares in his introduction that his study is limited to a focus on the development of the advanced-level dictionary, and also that he has "deliberately stopped short" of discussing any advanced learner's dictionary published in the 1990s. He offers as a reason his own need to remain detached from the discussion , a decision that I found puzzling and regrettable. That a scholar as respected as Mr. Cowie should choose to gloss over a decade in which the impact of corpus lexicography became fully evident in dictionaries produced with the aid of corpora calls into question the ultimate usefulness of this book as a complete history of the subject. The History, then, is in fact a description of the development of advanced -level learner dictionaries from their inception to 1989. Intermediate, beginner, and picture dictionaries are not covered, nor are the "production" dictionaries of the 1990s, not even in the final section that focuses on the dictionary user, where such a discussion would have been of great interest. Rather than in breadth, then, the strength of the History lies in its detail: in Mr. Cowie's descriptions of the scope of the task facing the earliest pioneers, and in his painstaking comparisons of the ways various early works treat the myriad elements that make up a learner's dictionary. There are six chapters in the History: "The Genesis of the Learner's Dictionary," "Phraseology and the Learner's Dictionary ," "The Second Generation of Learners' Dictionaries," "The Role of the Computer in Learner Lexicography," "The Third Generation of Learners' Dictionaries ," and "Focus on die Dictionary User." The longest chapter is the first, in which the pioneering work of Harold Palmer, Michael West, and A. S. Hornby in the early years of the 20th century is discussed in great detail. Mr. Cowie traces the beginnings of the vocabulary control movement that led to A General Service List ofEnglish Words (1953), a model of a basic vocabulary originally developed by Michael West in the 1930s and based on students ' needs, rather than culled from native-speaker dictionaries. Nearly all of the elements that are now familiar to learner lexicography can be traced to die work of Palmer, West, and Hornby: the listing of homographs separately, the defining of derivative forms, a pedagogical approach to grammar, the attention to issues of collocation and idiomaticity, as well as to characteristics of the spoken language. In illustrating the issues that these men were confronting, Mr. Cowie summarizes a point from West's report, Definition Vocabulary (1935): West put his finger unerringly on the characteristic weaknesses of definitions in the mother-tongue dictionary — the fondness Dictionaries:Journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 22 (2001) 206Reviews for defining the known (say, penal) in terms of the unknown ('instrument'? 'tapering'?), and the tendency to fall back on 'scatter-gun' techniques, whereby 'one fires off a number of near or approximate synonyms in the hope that one or other will hit the mark and be understood', as in: 'sinuate = tortuous , wavy, winding'. (24) The second chapter treats die questions of what constitutes a phrase, and how and where phrases should be shown in a dictionary. Here again we find the origin of a now-common convention, that of using bold type to indicate relative fixity of a phrase (Palmer's innovation) . Various categories of phrases are discussed; Mr. Cowie provides a table showing a scale of idiomaticity: Free combinationopen a window; a green wall Restricted collocationmeet the demand; easy money Figurative idiomcall the shots; a sacred cow Pure idiomspill the beans; a dead duck He then asserts that "the precision with which these various distinctions were captured in dictionaries of idioms and collocations compiled in the 1970s and 1980s would be an important measure of their quality" (71) . This assertion in fact points to...

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