A history of Roget's Thesaurus : Origins, development, and design (review)

Werner Hüllen’s exhaustive study of the history of one of the most influential books in the English language, Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus, moves across a range of subjects—biography, sociolinguistics, the history of the book, and, most importantly, the history of English and European lexicography.

Since Roget’s Thesaurusfirst appeared in 1852 it has been an indispensable reference book on the English language. Though this was not the first meaning-finder, or even the first synonym dictionary, it was the first to combine the synonym dictionary with the topical dictionary.

H sets for his historiography three organizational principles: synonymy outlined as an experience of everyday linguistic behavior, the historical path of English dictionaries of synonyms, and the topical tradition of English lexicography. Preceding this is a detailed account of Roget’s life and work. H underlines the fact that Roget trained as a natural philosopher and it was the framework of natural history that he employed in his thesaurus.

H then outlines the basic definitions and semantics of notions such as synonymy, homonymy, semantic fields, modes of ascertaining and describing word meanings, and contemporary ‘reverse theories’ of synonymy. Roget’s Thesaurus, suggests H, not only inscribes itself into earlier ideas of synonymy and onomasiology but also anticipates post-Saussurean semantics.

H then moves on to map the history of early practices and theories of synonymy, paying particular attention to the autonomous and deliberate traditions, going back to antiquity in order to do so. Starting with Plato, through Cicero, William Shakespeare, and Richard Trench, H suggests that we can have either of two ways to look at synonyms: we collect synonyms to show semantic overlap(cumulative synonymy), or we collect them to show semantic difference(differentiating synonymy). Roget’s Thesauruscombines both modes.

H argues that practical synonymy is a part of interpretative lexicography right from the seventeenth century, and shows the marked influence of John Locke’s philosophical theories. Human experience of the world (sensations) and of one’s mind (reflections), for Locke, leads to ideas that are expressed in words. The lexis of a language represents an idea-driven order that originates in reality but extends beyond it. Locke was proposing a ‘mental lexicography’ where ‘vocabulary identifies and gives order to reality because it provides the inalienable signs for the expression of ideas’ (170). Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary, argues H, illustrates Lockean semantics.

In Ch. 6, H opens with a study of Abbé Gabriel Girard (1718) who formulated a detailed theory of synonymy. Girard argued that there are synonyms in the sense of semantically similar lexemes and that there are no absolutely identical synonyms in the French language. He also suggested—and here he prefigures Ferdinand de Saussure—that meanings of words are constituted relative to the meanings of other, semantically related, words.

The next chapter maps the history of the topical tradition of lexicography in England and the European continent. The two ways of organizing the macrostructure of the dictionary are the alphabetical (semasiological) and the topical (onomasiological). These indicate two modes of perceiving and processing language—finding meanings for particular words/signs, and finding suitable words for concepts/meanings. Linked to the Enlightenment project of organizing the universe, the topical dictionary sought to encapsulate, classify, and provide a ready reference to the lexemes of reality itself. The concluding chapter is a structural analysis of Roget’s great work, cast in the usual macrostructure-microstructure-pragmatic structure model.

H’s work situates Roget’s great effort in a tradition of lexicography. The history of European lexicography enables H to mark continuities and discontinuities in theories of language. It also helps him present linguistics and language studies within larger epistemessuch as the Enlightenment, thereby showing how ideas about the world or reality not only inform but also generatevocabularies and modes of linguistic analyses. Language and language ‘games’ are as much epistemological as political, and this work provides a...