"The Big Four". "Learners' dictionaries" inför 2000-talet

Resumé

Cambridge International Dictionary of English 1995. Editor-in-chief: Paul Procter. Cambridge University Press.
Collins COBUILD English Dictionary, Second ed. 1995. Editor in Chief: John Sinclair. HarperCollins.
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Third ed. 1995. Director: Della Summers. Longman.
Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, Fifth ed. 1995. Editor: Jonathan Crowther. Oxford University Press.
This review article discusses certain general tendencies and issues in connection with the "The Big Four", i.e. the 1995 editions of the four English learners' dictionaries now commonly regarded as dominant. One readily noticeable trend is that, on a fiercely competitive market, learners' dictionaries are becoming increasingly bulky, covering more and more words and providing ever new kinds of information. The 1995 dictionaries are all based on enormous computerized corpora of both written and spoken language. While this does not eliminate gaps in coverage, it does mean, among other things, that informal spoken English can be paid special attention to. On the basis of a learners' corpus, one of the dictionaries also provides contrastive information concerning English "false friends" in relation to a number of different languages, an interesting attempt, albeit poorly executed, to bridge the gap between monolingual and bilingual lexicography. Another novelty is the introduction of corpus-based frequency information in two of the dictionaries. With regard to definition, all four dictionaries now employ restricted defining vocabularies, whereas there is no agreement on definition format or style. Semantically, there is a clear tendency towards eliminating, in the presentation of word meanings, the distinction between homonymy and polysemy, a lexicographically convenient strategy which, however, may be pedagogically questionable. The article ends with some reflections on the possible limits, not least from a pedagogical point of view, of traditional, printed learners' dictionaries, especially in comparison with the potential of future electronic dictionaries.