Systematic Lexicography (review)

‘Systematic lexicography’ here is the identification of ‘lexicographic types’, that is, groups of words with similar grammatical, semantic, pragmatic, prosodic, and cooccurrence patterns, and individuating words within those types through ‘lexicographical portraits’. As practiced by Apresjan, this often means minute observation of sets of near-synonyms in order to determine parameters on which they can be differentiated into smaller and smaller groups. This is a linguistically-informed lexicography, with the meaning-text theory of Igor Mel’čuk and the Moscow school serving as the theoretical bedrock.

Originally published in Russian in 1995, this volume makes key articles by A available to the English-speaking world for the first time. Part 1 consists of six chapters on ‘Problems of synonymy’. The first two (and the longest) chapters consist of the explanatory matter from A’s 1979 English-Russian dictionary of synonyms and the 1995 prospectus for his dictionary of Russian synonyms. Like the introduction to the Webster’s new dictionary of synonyms (1964), which A aimed to emulate in some respects, these chapters stand on their own as contributions to both the lexicographical and the lexicological literatures, providing principles for lexicographical practice and observation on the nature of synonymy, with copious examples. In the third chapter, ‘The picture of man as reconstructed from linguistic data’, A uses his experience in differentiating synonyms in order to attempt a portrait of the ‘naïve view’, or folk theory, of what it means to be human (at least for Russian speakers). Here the relevance Anna Wierzbicka’s work on the relation between language and cultural thought patterns is clear. The remaining chapters of Part 1 (‘Problems of synonymy’) provide three in-depth analyses of families of mental state verbs in Russian (schitat’ ‘consider’, znat’ ‘know’, and khotet’ ‘want’), with further introduction to the principles of systematic lexicography.

Part 2, ‘Systematic lexicography’, is a selection of A’s articles from the early 1990s. First is ‘Metaphor in the semantic representation of emotions’ (co-authored with his daughter, Valentina) which aptly critiques other proposals (e.g. love is a journey, grief is a viscous liquid) and proposes more physiologically-based metaphors. The next chapter reviews the Moscow and Polish schools’ approaches to semantic primitives and their relevance to a lexicographical metalanguage. Finally, A offers lexicographical portraits of the Russian verbs byt’ ‘to be’ and vyiti ‘to emerge’.

The translator has done an exemplary job in making the Russian examples transparent to the non-Russian-speaking reader. The fact that this is a collection of disparate articles, rather than a purpose-built introduction to systematic lexicography, means that the information is not presented in the most systematic or efficient way, but the information is indeed there, and valuable to the English-speaker interested in the theoretical aspects of lexicography.