Defining Abstract Nouns from Citations: From Shame to Ruin, from Affinity to Sorrow

Defining Abstract Nouns from Citations: From Shame to Ruin, from Affinity to Sorrow D: Joseph P. Pickett Houghton Mifflin Company kefining from citations is never an easy task, but in my expedience it can be at its most difficult when the word in question is an abstract noun. The difficulty arises largely from the vagueness of meaning that is inherent in most abstractions, even those diat would seem less abstract or are more direcdy a part of ordinary experience (such as feelings) than otiiers (such as conditions or qualities). Where citations for abstract adjectives can usually be sorted in rough semantic categories on the basis ofthe kinds ofnouns tiiey modify, abstract nouns normally do not have such ready linguistic tip-offs for the definer, and they have to be sorted from the start by assessing the larger context of the quotation. As educated adults, definers usually have some preconceived notion of what a word means, and even preconceived notions about its sense divisions. With abstract nouns, these notions are usually based on conceptual arrangements, linguistic environments, and lexical oppositions drawn from a lifetime of language use and observation. For example , most adults who think of an abstraction like shame see it in contrast to words like honor on the one hand, and guilt on die other. Shame is public disgrace, as opposed to the public approval of honor, and shame is also a bad feeling associated with being caught and disgraced by a community for doing something wrong, rather than private self-reproach or guilt for not living up to a standard or expectation ofbehavior whether anyone else finds out about it or not. Dictionaries:Journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 27 (2006) , 143-148 144Joseph Pickett But the citations for a word like this can easily defy such neat conceptual schemes and leave the definer, especially when inexperienced, at a loss for how to proceed. A well known problem in defining is that many citations do not provide sufficient information for the definer to make a comfortable decision about the semantic subfield that a given quotation belongs in. This is true for concrete nouns as well as abstract ones, but citations for abstractions can be especially impoverished in the information they provide about meaning. A definer can construct a plausible semantic scheme for aword, but find that most of the citations at hand are unusable for it because they could just as easily be interpreted as belonging under any of several possible definitions. The abundance of unusable or rejected citations then calls into question the validity of the editor's inchoate semantic distinctions, and the definer can be left wondering if there are any legitimate distinctions worth making in the first place, or if some other semantic scheme should be attempted from scratch. This challenge is not so great for commercial lexicographers as it is for people working on historical dictionaries, who are charged with presenting evidence for the development of a word's meanings over a period of time. To do so responsibly, the editor must include in an entry any number of semantically dubious quotations if only because their date of composition or recording is required or desirable as part of the project's effort to show periodic attestation. Thus, when texts for a given period of time are sparse (as in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in the Middle English period) , and the editor is lucky enough to have a citation from one of them, the editor has no choice but to include it and somehow account for it in the entry, even if he or she cannot be exactly certain of the word's meaning. Other criteria for requiring a given quotation's inclusion in an entry are evidence of dialectal usage (as when a text is known to be written in a particular dialect and has spellings assumed to be indicative of dialectal pronunciation) and evidence of a syntactic construction or collocation that the editor feels should be made available to readers. Working with citations like this can conjure a linguistic landscape that is a mushy, foggy bottomland without discernible semantic landmarks . The editor does well simply to plant semantic signposts at those...