Investigating an Onomasiological Approach to Dictionary Material

INVESTIGATING AN ONOMASIOLOGICAL APPROACH TO DICTIONARY MATERIAL BARBARA ANN KIPFER With the range of computer-aided techniques now available for compilation and presentation of dictionaries, it is possible to transform the traditional sense-finding or semasiological dictionary into an onomasiological or word-finding dictionary. An onomasiological approach would offer a total reorganization of dictionary material and open diversified access to information formerly hidden behind a structure of alphabetized headwords. There is no denying that the time-honored alphabetical arrangement of entries has serious disadvantages for many users who are interested in the differences among related words. Often a dictionary's conventions assist us in understanding what we are looking at, but much more often there is information within the definitions that could lead us on to the words that express our ideas. Onomasiology is a theory or method that starts by defining useful concepts and connects them to terms that can be used to designate them. It is the study of words and expressions having similar or associated concepts (for instance, along social, regional, or occupational lines). In this approach, one does not start with an entry word to be defined but, rather, with a text that identifies a concept. Finding a term for a concept can be thought of as "designating"; finding a meaning for a word can be called "signifying." The primary language phenomenon dictionaries deal with is the organization and selection of word senses; word sense discrimination is the key to language comprehension. The user has an idea to convey and needs a dictionary to convert the originally vague concept into good, idiomatic expression. Onomasiology proceeds from "things" to the expressions that denote them. It has been described as an applied and immediately practical branch of linguistics that investigates naming in various domains—for instance, terminology in agriculture, disease, and athletics (L. Zgusta; see Riggs 1983). 55 56 An Onomasiological Approach to Dictionaries It is hardly surprising that few dictionaries are organized semantically. It may be realistic for a small-scale dictionary, but anything larger would be inaccessible without indexes. (Topical dictionaries and thesauri of the Roget type are examples.) The Semasiological Dictionary Most dictionaries offer only a single view of their contents, a single presentation order for a body of information that has numerous other orderings and possible structures. Alphabetical arrangement of the entries in a dictionary is so restrictive that it should probably be among the first properties to be discarded when full use of the entries appears in electronic form. Access to a dictionary by semantic criteria should become as important to dictionary users as the ability to look up unknown words by their spellings. Anyone who uses dictionaries for meanings understands the frustration of knowing that a word exists while being unable to think of it. One can guess and search, using help from synonyms, cross references, and other notes. Something should be done to rectify this shortcoming of dictionaries and to keep the user from settling for a guess or an inaccuracy by finding a way to make the right word easily available. A printed dictionary is simply a mapping of senses onto words, imagined as a matrix of words along the top and the senses down the side. Any printed dictionary could be represented this way. One difference between printed dictionaries , which can only be entered with a word, and this matrix or an electronic dictionary is that the latter can be entered with either words or senses. Barbara Ann Kipfer57 Other Dictionary Formats Laurence Urdang (1986) has said it is surprising that we have not been more resourceful in developing methods for organizing and accessing dictionaries. He surveyed the main arrangements available besides alphabetical (letter-by-letter and word-by-word) as being: chronological (day-by-day and year-by-year with, in certain cases, a cross-grid of general thematic categories); indexed (words and phrases, topics, and content); thematic (usually supplemented by an index); rhyming; etymological, and structured (e.g., the Roget-type thesaurus with an index). Only thematic and structured formats use concepts as the basis of their methodology and attempt to go from "meaning" to word. "Reverse" dictionaries exist (e.g., Bernstein's Reverse Dictionary), but they...