Wierzbicka's Theory and the Practice of Lexicography

Wierzbicka's Theory and the Practice of Lexicography Sidney I. Landau Anna Wierzbicka's method in "What Are the Uses of Theoretical Lexicography?" is impeccably logical and brilliantly executed, with fine sensitivity to the pragmatic interactions that contribute much to meaning but that do not, in my view, define it. Ironically, her defining method is most likely to influence ESL dictionaries, less likely (for entirely practical reasons) to influence children's dictionaries , and least likely of all to have any effect on commercial adult dictionaries such as college dictionaries. This is ironic because her method is not didactic but descriptive. She does not argue, so far as I know, that her method of defining is the best way to teach vocabulary or to promote a better understanding of meaning, but that it is simply the only way to define truly and accurately, that is to say, in a descriptively faithful way. But ESL and children's dictionaries are pedagogical as well as descriptive. They also pay more attention to encoding than do college dictionaries, which are concerned mainly with decoding , and it is in the encoding function that Wierzbicka's method has its chief potential to influence practical lexicography. Although I admire the rigor of Wierzbicka's argument and her discipline in demonstrating how it works in practice, her insistence on the "invariant concept" seems to me chiefly an article of faith born of her irritation over the excessive use of polysemy by many dictionaries . One can agree, as I do, that dictionaries often rely too heavily on polysemy and can still have doubts about the value of the invariant concept. This, ofcourse, is a very old idea, one that Home Tooke promulgated in the 18th century and that has been adopted in modern dress by contemporary scholars (see Ruhl 1989), and while Wierzbicka 's invariant concept is less compulsively monosemic than that of the others, the arguments for such unities seem to ignore the stubborn diversity of actual usage. 114Sidney I. Landau Reading her paper, one might suppose that her method was entirely intuitive. In fact, as one realizes from Wierzbicka's work (especially 1985, 1987), she relies on citational evidence to support her definitions. However, the citations are used to confirm the truth value of folk definitions rather than as evidence from which to induce definitions . This is rather like a doctor who forms a diagnosis and then tries to find symptoms to support it. Folk definitions so created are models for creating new uses, and are thus excellent pedagogical aids for foreign learners, who will not be insulted by the simple and methodical iteration of short, declarative statements; but they will be of littíe value in disambiguatingclosely related uses in subtíy varyingcontexts , a purpose often motivating native speakers to use a dictionary. Furthermore, I must announce resolutely (blast of trumpets, please) that every word is definable, pace Wierzbicka, Arnauld, and whomever else she wants to quote. I am sorry to try her patience with this obstinate refusal to witness the Truth, and I acknowledge readily that every definition may not please Wierzbicka and that some circularity will therefore be inevitable, although not necessarily compressed in such tight circles as she has demonstrated by examining a 1959 "Webster's" dictionary published by Fawcett (a mass-market paperback ?) and the shortest of Oxford's line of dictionaries, the Oxford Paperback Dictionary (OPD), which, with all due respect to Oxford, hardly represent lexicography at its best. Mass-market paperbacks like Fawcett's are generally prepared by makeshift free-lance teams hired to meet impossible deadlines and required to abridge the parent work (which may be an old, inferior, out-of-copyright dictionary) to a ridiculously short compass in order to price the book competitively . As Atkins points out in her "Theoretical Lexicography and Its Relation to Dictionary-making," pricing often determines many other lexicographic policies, and nowhere is this more critical than in massmarket dictionaries. To take editors of such books to task for not being properly concerned with the truth is rather like criticizing McDonald 's kitchen workers for being unconcerned about the beauty of a Big Mac. These editors are working for a living. Their jobs...