The Bloomsbury Companion to Lexicography edited by Howard Jackson (review)

Howard Jackson is the author of highly readable and very useful books, among which are Words and Their Meaning (1988), Words, Meaning and Vocabulary (2000 and 2007), and Lexicography: An Introduction (2002). A new book is therefore welcome. Some will say there are already plenty of books on lexicography. Apart from Jackson’s own 2002 manual and the “Bible” edited by Hausmann et al. (1989–1991), you can choose between van Sterkenburg (2003), Atkins and Rundell (2008), and Svensén (2009), to take only the more recent ones written in English, and excluding those that specialize in e-lexicography or in the lexicography of a particular language. And more are forthcoming: one, edited by Philip Durkin, is mentioned in this Companion, and I have heard of two others, also by prestigious authors or editors. Why this new Bloomsbury Companion to Lexicography (BCL), then? One answer is that the collection of companions published by Bloomsbury needed a volume on lexicography, to place alongside existing volumes on cognitive linguistics, syntax, discourse analysis, historical linguistics, phonetics, etc. But that is not quite enough. BCL must offer something that other comparable books do not. Assessing whether it does that, and does it well, is the object of the present review.

Some books on lexicography are by single authors, others assemble contributions from different authors; BCL belongs to the second category. This has advantages: it means that each issue can be addressed by a specialist and that the theme of the book will be seen from different angles. The difficulty for the editor is to ensure coherence and an even quality between the different contributions and, as much as possible, to avoid repetition.

BCL is a collection of essays by different authors, but it is more than just a collection of essays. It comes equipped with a rich “metatext.” There is the usual list of contributors at the beginning of the book, with a short bio for each, the usual “Introduction” by the editor, a seventeen-page text (Part 1) with a substantial summary of each chapter in the book, and the usual index (of notions, not of proper names) at the end. But there is more. There is a Part 6, “Resources,” by Reinhard Hartmann, which is an exploration of the resources available to researchers in lexicography: academies, associations, corpora, databases, journals, networks, online dictionaries, publishers, and university research centers; there is a sixteen-page glossary of lexicographic terms (Part 7) by Barbara Ann Kipfer, listing 102 entries from abridged dictionary to wordlist; and there is an eleven-page general “Annotated bibliography” with 112 titles arranged in thirteen sections, each with a brief but very useful description of the contents (Part 8). BCL is obviously a book to be used as much as read.

Part 2, “A history of research in lexicography,” by the late Paul Bogaards, is also a kind of introduction. Drawing on his experience as editor of the International Journal of Lexicography from 2002 to his untimely death in 2012, Bogaards distinguishes six main areas for research in lexicography: the history of dictionaries, the description of dictionaries, dictionary typology, dictionary structure, dictionary use, and dictionary content. The six areas could be united, he says, if there were a recognized theory of lexicography, “but up to now it is unclear how such a theory should, or even could, be formulated” (28)—more on this below.

BCL has twenty-three authors in all, from ten countries: five from Britain, four from Denmark, three from Poland, three from Spain, two from the Netherlands, two from Japan, one from China, one from Canada, one from the US, and one from South Africa. It is notoriously difficult to assemble contributors for a volume, and we all know that the final choices depend partly on circumstance, on who is available and who is not. Still, the list of the authors of BCL is interesting. All are well known and can be expected...