Linguistics ,  Lexicology and Lexicography
L630 ,   Kevin Rottet

From the marginal glosses of medieval manuscripts penned in dreary
monasteries to the bilingual lexicons of the Renaissance
classicists, and on to the electronic dictionaries of today?s hi-
tech publishing houses, dictionaries have been essential
repositories and even shapers of language. This course will survey
major issues and techniques in lexicology (the scientific study of
words), and lexicography (the art of dictionary making). Looking
first at lexicology, we will consider topics such as componential
analysis; semantic primitives (do all languages have a common
semantic core?); prototype theory (why are some birds more ?birdy?
than others?); semantic relations including problems of homonymy and
polysemy, metonymy and metaphor (in English, time is money; in
French, money is food) and how these are deployed creatively
throughout the lexicon of a language. Turning our attention to
lexicography, we will examine, inter alia, definitions (how are they
constructed and what is Aristotelian about them?), sense
distinctions (do words really have separate enumerable definitions
or is this a convenient fiction?), and problems of etymology. We
will examine how data are gathered for a dictionary, from Murray?s
thousand volunteer readers for the OED (including at least one
madman jotting citations on slips of paper from the comfort of his
asylum) to the exhaustive electronic concordancing of multi-million
word corpora. Issues in the compilation of bilingual dictionaries,
dictionaries of collocations, learners? dictionaries, and research
on the dictionary user will also be examined. Interest in a wide
variety of languages is welcome.