Dictionaries: An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography. Supplementary Volume: Recent Developments with a Focus on Electronic and Computational Lexicography ed. by Rufus Gouws etal. (review)

The volume under review is a supplement to the massive three-volume Wörterbücher / Dictionaries / Dictionnaires: An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography (etc.) published between 1989 and 1991. The supplement’s subtitle proclaims a goal of accounting for “Recent Developments, with Focus on Electronic and Computational Lexicography.” At 1,600 pages and 110 articles, it would not be feasible even to list the table of contents in the space available here, let alone to single out more than a few of the individual contributions. But I will characterize the contents at a high level; the full table of contents may be seen at www.degruyter.com/view/product/175228.

Survey of Contents

After a preface and two overview articles, one focusing on the computationally focused sections, the major areas covered by the supplement are: new developments in lexicographic theory (articles 3–36, pages 31–611), new developments in language-specific lexicography (articles 37–65, pages 612–968), and the electronic/computational articles, (65–110, pages 969–1497).

Articles 3–36: New developments in lexicographic theory

The first 300 pages (22 percent of the main text of the book, accounting for half of the page count of the “theoretical developments” articles) comprise eight articles with Herbert Ernst Wiegand as the first author. All of them apply Wiegand’s theoretical approach to textual, micro-, macro-, and access structures specifically in print dictionaries.

Anyone who has spent time with the original encyclopedia will remember the striking, detailed, set-theoretical diagrams with which Wiegand and his colleagues illustrate their analyses of dictionary structures. Such diagrams are abundant also in these early sections of the supplement. For anyone not acquainted with them, Figure 1 shows one such diagram, from article 3, “Textual structures in printed dictionaries: an overview” by Wiegand, Sandra Beer, and Rufus Gouws, and Figure 2 shows the entry it schematizes.

Figure 1.

THE CAPTION SAYS THIS DIAGRAM ILLUSTRATES DICTIONARY EXCERPT 3.5, AND THE IN-TEXT REFERENCE TO THE DIAGRAM SAYS IT REFERS TO EXCERPT3.4, BUT IT APPEARS THAT 3.6 DA₃ IS THE EXCERPT ILLUSTRATED BY THIS DIAGRAM.

After the diagrammatic Wiegand-dominated section, the other half of the “new developments” section has twenty-seven articles addressing other dictionary genres and other kinds of alphabetical reference in more straightforward descriptive updates on developments since 1990. These articles cover a wide range of dictionary genres: learner and bilingual dictionaries as well as lexicography for special purposes. Carolin Müller-Spitzer surveys “Textual structures in electronic dictionaries” in comparison with their print counterparts, using diagrams that are less set-theoretical and more schematic, and also more tractable by readers without a grounding in set theory. Other articles are explorations of lexicographical challenges such as culture-bound items and sensitive terms, and of shifting approaches to collocation and example sentences. Six articles in sixty pages cover “research into dictionary production and use,” including a review of user research since 1990. Five articles cover organizational issues around training, organization of lexicography teams (intriguingly, in the form of a case study from a post-Apartheid South African perspective: “Establishing lexicography units” by Eleanor Cornelius), dictionary evaluation, and further resources for metalexicography.

Figure 2.

THE ENTRY FOR DA₃, THE SUBJECT OF THE SCHEMA SHOWN IN FIGURE 1.

Articles 37–65: Language-specific developments

The language-specific articles are a mixture of updates on languages previously covered by the encyclopedia and new articles to fill earlier coverage gaps. Nearly all are written by new authors with new perspectives, and therefore often bring updated approaches to the pre-1990 history of their fields. This increases the usefulness of the...