Historical Principles Vs. Synchronic Approaches

International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-45369-4_3-1 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 Historical principles vs. synchronic approaches Judy Pearsall* Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Abstract Although there have been numerous studies of both synchronic and historical lexicographical features of dictionaries, few of them have been directly comparative, and this might seem surprising. In this chapter, a number of questions are addressed. What is the context and background for synchronic and historical approaches in dictionaries, and what does it mean to make this distinction in the first place? What are the key distinguishing features of synchronic and historical descriptions, and why do they matter, for the user or for anyone else? Also, what are the individual challenges and issues in the two approaches? As well as an overview of some key moments in the development of the debate, the questions will be approached by means of a case study – of the word “capital”–and analysis of specific lexicographical features. The examples are drawn from English language lexicography and are focused on general dictionaries (as opposed to dictionaries specially designed for children or learners of English), but there is an expectation that many of the observations can be generalized to apply to other languages and lexicographical contexts. Introduction: Context and Background For the purposes of this chapter, the terms “historical” and “synchronic” are defined with respect to dictionaries as follows: a dictionary which follows a “synchronic” approach is one which is concerned primarily with the language as it exists at a particular time (in practice, the present day). A “historical” dictionary or a dictionary with a “diachronic” approach is one which is concerned primarily with language as it has developed and evolved through time. The term “historical” is used in preference to “diachronic,” given that it was the term in the nineteenth century applied to dictionaries and language study. The habitual use of the contrastive terms “synchronic” and “historical” (or “diachronic”) in relation to language (and dictionaries) is relatively recent. The nineteenth century was characterized by the growth in historical linguistics and the establishment of some of the greatest dictionaries on historical principles, including the Grimm brothers’ Deutsches Wo¨rterbuch (first volumes published 1854, initiated in the 1830s) and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, published 1884–1928, initiated in the late 1850s). In English, the term “historical” with reference to language study is recorded in the first half of the nineteenth century (see OED’s sense 2c, and the citation from 1832). In this context, study of language was seen as an account of evolutionary development, whose aim was tracing words from their earliest origins to the present day. Historical dictionaries were, and are, primarily documentary accounts rather than practical tools for using the language. According to Richard C. Trench, author of the influential paper On some deficiencies in our English Dictionaries: “A Dictionary is an historical monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view” (Trench 1860, p. 6). However, it is not true to suggest that the editors of these dictionaries did not consider the interplay between diachronic and synchronic. In his “General Explanations,” James Murray describes the temporal nature of “the living language” as well as the impermanence of any synchronic view of the language, which he described as “no more permanent in *Email: [email protected] Page 1 of 14 International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-45369-4_3-1 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 its constitution than definite in its extent” (Murray 1884, p. xviii). But it was the relationship between the current language and the past language that was important, as was understanding how the current language is informed by its history. Moreover, the historical perspective was the only one, or at least the only one that was regarded as academically – and to some extent morally – justified. It was important that the literary greats of the past were read and absorbed in order to enrich and enlighten the present population’s understanding of words today, or as Trench writes, “[in words] there are boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination laid up” (Trench 1851). Not only did words come to have meaning for us only by means of their history, but also “The study of language is ...the most potent means ...for planting us in the true past of our country” (Trench 1860, p. 8). It was not until the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and the development of structural linguistics in the twentieth century that the case was put forward for a serious study of language as a system in itself, operating at any particular point in time and without reference to a temporal dimension, which functioned through the interrelations of the component parts and could be studied as a formal construct. Where words came from or how they had been used in the past was less important than how words related to each other and how meaning was constructed through those relations. In English, the words “diachronic” and “synchronic” were borrowed directly from the French as used by Saussure and recorded in his posthu- mous Cours de linguistique geńe´rale (1916). Structuralism was hugely influential in linguistics and anthropology in the early and mid-twentieth century. Even if much of Saussure’s thinking has now been superseded, the work of the structuralists was important in changing the terms of the debate and overturning the strongly held assumption that linguistic study was necessarily historical, thereby resetting the debate for the emergence of synchronic theories, especially theories of meaning, which would have a greater influence on lexicography later on. Of course, dictionaries which were synchronic in their approach and content had existed for many years, but they were regarded as functional tools rather than serious contributions to the field of language study. They were considered less important intellectually for being merely useful, “primers” for the ordinary man and woman to enable them to understand the current language and communicate effectively. Funk & Wagnall’s A Standard Dictionary of the English Language was a large and ambitious dictionary of current (American) English, but the professed approach was functional, almost apologetically so, rather than academic, as indicated in the Preface: It has been thought better not to follow a system simply because it is logical or philosophically correct, if practically it hinders rather than helps the inquirer. (F&W 1893, p. xi) If structural linguistics was a necessary foundation that gave academic (if not moral) credence to synchronic approaches and allowed new discourses to emerge, any influence on dictionaries was not seen until much later. Several theoretical developments, in particular those related to theories of meaning, were important in terms of their application and use in dictionaries. From Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language to the emergence of corpus linguistics in the late 1960s and Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory in the 1970s, these developments had features in common: first, they were empirical, and second, they located meaning in the usage and behavior of language itself rather than in any external reference or abstract “langue.” Wittgenstein’s contribution, for example, came from his later writing in Philosophical Investigations (1953), and his idea of “family resemblance,” in which he challenged the well-established Classical notion that words had fixed definite meanings (and, in contrast to his earlier writing, that they had a direct relationship to objects in the real world). Taking the idea of resemblance between family members, he showed how the word “game” encompassed a number of features – such as rules, an element of competition, having more than one player, enjoyment – but that individual games (hockey, Scrabble, solitaire, and so on) didn’t each need to have all of these features to be called a “game.” They share some Page 2 of 14 International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-45369-4_3-1 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 features, not others. Eleanor Rosch looked at meaning from the perspective of cognitive psychology, showing that perception of word meaning was informed by the idea of prototypes rather than fixed boundaries. By this analysis, we know that a robin and an ostrich are both types of “bird,” but some birds (and some features of birds, such as ability to fly) are considered more prototypical than others. The prototypical bird, for native speakers of English in the Western world, is typically a robin not an ostrich. Meanwhile, dictionaries published around the turn of the twentieth century (for example, the Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD 1911) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1898)) were published as dictionaries for everyday use, but they were more like compact versions of their historically based parents and as such largely preserved their organizational principles and features. While the Preface to COD states that the principle of ordering senses “has been that of logical connexion or of comparative familiarity or importance” (COD 1911, p. vii), a quick glance at the contents suggests otherwise. COD’s entry for “chuck” verb, for example, is typical in replicating the senses in exactly the same order as the OED (thus placing the sense “chuck under the chin” before the core senses relating to throwing and discarding). Over subsequent years editorial policies for these dictionaries were tweaked to give a better description of the current language (sense order was adjusted, modern examples replaced old-fashioned ones), but none of these tweaks represented a serious challenge to the lexical status quo and their practice, while now focused on the current language, frequently betrayed their historical bias (or perhaps, in the absence of sufficient empirical evidence, just their lack of a viable alternative).

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