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Chapter 2 The philosophical and scientific status of lexicography One central issue in any area of human thought concerns the philosophical and scientific status of the area in question, including its relationship with other areas. Lexicography is no exception. This dissertation is based on the idea that lexicography is both an area of social practice and an independent science or area of academic study in line with other areas of the humanities such as literary studies and linguistics. Lexicography is the science of dictionaries. [] 2.1 Lexicography the science of dictionaries Dictionaries are man-mad, culture-specific products which have been developed to meet certain social needs. According to the current conclusions of lexicographical research, the first dictionaries were produced about 4,000 years ago (Collison 1982, McArthur 1986, Hausmann 1989). This happened in India, with China and the Arab world following suit later, and the practice was closely connected to the religions of those days and interpretation of the holy scriptures (Haywood 2003, Katre 2003, Shiqi 2003). As language developed and changed, making the reading and understanding of religious texts increasingly difficult, lexicographical work became the domain of priests, who started to produce books explaining and translating words from the old language into modern language. This is how the first dictionaries were written: a specific social need (the explanation of old words) arose among a specific group of people (priests) in a specific situation (reading the scriptures). Acknowledgement of this close causal connection between registered social needs and the development and production of dictionaries as culture-specific products is the essential basis for regarding lexicography as a science. The history of dictionaries is also the history of society, or to be more precise: the history of dictionaries is part of the history of society. [] Without a causal relationship between dictionaries and social needs, theoretical lexicography will remain a pre-, semi- or even pseudo-science. At this point it is worth adding that the relationship between social needs and dictionaries is not like that pertaining between the chicken and the egg. In lexicography the primary factor is undoubtedly social needs, while dictionaries are a secondary derivative. However, this does not of course mean that dictionaries cannot have a positive or negative effect on social needs. Nor does it mean that the relationship is always clear and unambiguous, since on the one hand some dictionaries are written for which there is no great need (they rather reflect the authors wish to record his knowledge in the form of a dictionary), while on the other there are also needs that have not yet been adequately covered by dictionaries. Learners dictionaries in the modern sense of the word arose when English became a
dominant world language around the Second World War (Cowie 1999), while on the other hand there are languages which a large group of non-native speakers need to learn for which there are no learners dictionaries or at least no learners dictionaries of the required quality (cf. Gouws 1993, 1996, 2000 and Gouws/Tarp 2004, for instance). Dictionaries are the object of study of lexicography. Ever since the first dictionaries were produced thousands of years ago, tens or even hundreds of thousands of dictionaries have been published. In Danish alone, no fewer than 1,541 monolingual or bilingual specialised dictionaries have been published by 1990 (Mikkelsen 1994). And the frequency of publication has not abated since the advent of the electronic media. This fund of empirical data is enormous so it is hardly surprising that a literature on dictionaries arose and gradually developed into a separate branch of science. The first lexicographical ideas can be found in the prefaces which authors of dictionaries (Samuel Johnson in 1755, for instance) used to express their thoughts on this subject thoughts which now constitute a great fund of data for lexicographical history research (Hausmann 1989, Osselton 1989); or in reviews one of the most remarkable of which is that written by Beni (1612), containing nearly 400 pages of criticism of an Italian dictionary published in 1543, complete with suggestions for improvements. But there are also a few independent publications on lexicography, some of the most famous of which are probably dAlemberts and Diderots special articles on dictionaries and encyclopaedias respectively in the Great French Encyclopaedia, of which they themselves were the editors (dAlembert 1754, Diderot 1755). All these valuable contributions were pre-theoretical by nature, since it was not until the 20 th century that true lexicographical theory arouse defined as a systematic set of statements about dictionaries and their relationship to social needs. Since then, lexicographical thinking has developed using a range of competitive and successful paradigms, of which the following examples from western cultural circles are worthy of particular attention: Scerbas Draft for a general lexicographical theory (Scerba 1940); Hausmanns theoretical considerations (Hausmann 1977); Kromann et al.s active passive theory (Kromann et al. 1984, 1992); Wiegands general lexicographical theory (Wiegand 1977, 1998. Thanks to Wiegand (1989), there is now a tradition for considering four main components within dictionary research: research in dictionary usage, critical dictionary research, historical dictionary research, and systematic dictionary research. Depending on the criteria on which these categories are based, the number of components could be more than four or less than four. But no matter how many components are considered, Wiegands classification constitutes a sound framework for a branch of research which is distinguished from other disciplines because dictionaries are the object of its study. In other words, lexicography is fundamentally different from linguistics, because its object of study is a culture-specific product (dictionaries); while the object of study of linguistics is something inherent in mankind without which Man would not be Man (language). And lexicography can be distinguished from
the study of literature because dictionaries have a special function as reference works and objects of use, etc. [] To summarise, we can conclude that lexicography satisfies all the demands made on any branch of human activity that claims to be a separate science or area of academic study; 1. it has its own object of study: dictionaries, or to be more precise the production, structure and dictionary usage and the close relationship between dictionaries and specific types of social need; 2. it is rooted in the form of concepts, categories, theories and hypotheses; 3. it comprises both the history of dictionaries and its own history, including pre-theoretical ideas;