Grammar and the dictionary

In the design of a monolingual EFL dictionary it is clear that a balance must be preserved between a portrait of the vocabulary of the language and an adequate description of the use of words in the productive mode. Obviously, the expectations of learners that they will be supplied with explanations of the rarer senses of words has to be met; at the same time too much attention to the complex syntactic relations which ‘core’, high-frequency items often enter can be impractical. In this respect the nature of the syntactic informa-tion supplied by the lexicographer will be crucial. For example, Cowie (1983a) points out that in the case of a quite common verb such as enter, it is not

adequate for the EFL learner to be told, as occurs in the general monolingual Collins English Dictionary (CED), that the verb is transitive and that among its more frequent collocates are [society, army, church] or [names, details, information etc. in a book, inventory etc.] or [as competitor for a race]. Such learners of English require more detailed and arguably more crucial informa-tion about the syntactic patterns formed by the verb and its different but inseparable prepositions:

enter sb. as a member enter sb. at public school enter sth. in a diary

Additionally, learners would need to know that the passive form cannot be used with enter [room] but is permissible with other collocations (e.g. the details were entered in the book); also that enter [society, room] can take both indefinite and definite articles before the noun but that enter [army, church]

is more usual with the definite article before the noun (except where the latter is a building as opposed to the institution). Another ‘simple’ verb such as die also lends itself to the production of errors with prepositions. Non-native learners should know, at least, that the verb has the following prepositional patterns: ‘die of hunger; by violence, by one’s own hand; from a wound;

through neglect; in battle; for a cause; at the hands of the enemy; on the scaffold; at the stake’. In an interesting discussion of grammar in dictionaries, Sinclair (1981) cites the phrase It’s not in his nature to complain and points out that the learner needs to know a lot of information about individual words in the phrase. For example, that it is invariable and obligatory; that not is optional and can be substituted by adverbs such as hardly, quite, very much; that in is invariable; that his and to complain can commute with, respectively, any possessive pronoun or proper name and with almost any infinitive clause. Additionally, to complain can front the phrase in place of it; and it is also necessary for this phrase to be distinguished from It’s in the nature of (e.g. It’s in the nature of a celebration). In the face of such facts (and assuming, Sinclair argues, that such usage can be attested in a database) it is clearly inadequate for a single example to be supplied without any indication of the morphological, syntactic and stylistic patterns the phrase can generate.

For the specification of syntactic patterns, especially those in the simple sentence and the noun phrase, learner dictionaries such as the LDCE and OALD have adopted coding systems. These enable learners to check, for example, object–complement relations, transitive/intransitive patterns, whether a noun is countable or uncountable or an adjective or attributive.

The verb determine has the following entry in the 1974 OALD:

determine . . . vt, vi 1 (VP6A, 10) decide; fix precisely: to — the meaning of a word; to — a date for a meeting. 2 (VP6A) calculate; find out 152 Lexis and lexicography

precisely: to — the speed of light/the height of a mountain by trigonometry. 3 (VP6A, 7A, 9, 8, 10, 3A) — to do sth; on/upon sth, decide firmly, resolve, make up one’s mind: He —d to learn Greek. We

—d to start early/—d on an early start. He has —d on proving/—d to prove his friend’s innocence. Have they —d where the new school will be built? He has —d that nothing shall/will prevent him. His future has not yet been —d, but he may study medicine. 4 (VP17, 14) sb to do sth/

against sth, cause to decide: What —d you to accept the offer? The news

—d him against further delay. 5 (VP6A) be the fact that —s: The size of your feet —s the size of your shoes. Do heredity and environment — a man’s character? . . .

Coded grammatical information in the OALD explicitly tells the learner how the word in each of its senses, 1 to 5, takes a particular type or types of clause pattern. Thus, for example, with definition 3 are listed, among others, grammatical codes 7A and 10, which, supported by illustrative sentences, stand for the following construction types:

VP7A Subject+vt (not)+to infinitive, etc.

He determined to learn Greek.

VP10 Subject+vt dependent clause/question

Have they determined where the new school will be built?

But with definition 5 the sentence pattern is YP6A, which denotes the following type:

VP6A Subject+vt noun/pronoun

Do heredity and environment determine a man’s character?

The coding system here derives from research by Hornby in the 1940s which aimed to provide the learner with illustrations and information designed to eliminate errors in language production. One main problem with such codings is that learners have to invest a considerable amount of time and effort in mastering a system which is in itself very complex and requires constant reference to another part of the dictionary before any clear return is shown. Not all learners are prepared to invest in this, though such systems are not without considerable advantages in language-learning contexts (see also Cowie, 1981).¹

More acute problems arise in the appropriate provision of entries for phrasal verbs and related idiomatic expressions. Such difficulties include the need to differentiate semantically between get sth. over, get over sth./smb., get smb. over sth. (where sth. stands for something and smb. stands for somebody) as in:

She can’t get her ideas over to her students.

She can get over the loss of her mother.

She tried to get her sister over the disappointment.

She was in love and couldn’t get over him.

I am so surprised. I can’t get over it.

Here examples need to be juxtaposed for the different meanings to be derived and for positional variation and restriction in the use of the preposition to be recorded. Comparison with other phrasal verbs illustrates the complexities here:

He took (off) his clothes off. (remove) He took (off) his voice off perfectly. (imitate)

where in the case of take off there is greater mobility in the transposition of the adverbial particle. It should be noted though that such devices as bold type, abbreviations like sth. and smb., semantically contrasting citations, and brackets and oblique strokes can assist overall clarity of presentation.

Capturing the syntactic behaviour of items necessarily involves more than positional variations and patterns. It also involves complex issues of compounds and derivatives. Problems here include matters of sequential arrangement. For example, should a compound like time-wasting be listed under the entry for time or for waste? Should pen-pusher be listed under pen or push? And if the admissibility of the construction in declarative clause form is taken as a criterion (*He pushes pen; He wastes time) then can the learner be reasonably expected to know this in advance? It is clear that enter-ing the item under the verb form emphasizes grammatical relationships but the inexperienced dictionary user, who will probably rely on alphabetic ordering, may be easily deterred by necessary inconsistencies. For example, in the case of nominal compounds such as lock-keeper or strike-breaker the frequency of the verbs keep and break and a correspondingly dense and detailed entry may mean that inclusion under the noun is preferable. Though, by the above criteria, an item such as air-traffic controller or keep-fit fanatic or price-war-zones would prove notably intractable. Hyphenization, stress and spelling (though, of these, hyphenization is most variable in usage) can also be determining factors (see Cowie, 1983b for detailed discussion of a range of relevant examples). In the case of derivatives, decisions over points of entry can involve sharper semantic differentiation as well as issues of spelling. It is reasonable that encouragement should be listed under the entry for its root encourage from which it derives in a simple way rather than as a separate entry. But such is not the case with an item such as high from which the following items may be said to derive: high class; highly strung; height, heighten, heights. Should there be one entry here or six separate ones? Or can the items be grouped semantically or inflectionally in any way: e.g. high/high 154 Lexis and lexicography

class(?); height/heights(?)? Should differences in spelling in a derived form merit separate treatment or might this too readily assume that the learner knows the different spellings involved (e.g. critic, critical, criticize; medicine, medical; satisfy, satisfaction). There are also problems where the derivations reflect closely related but distinct differences of meaning. Cowie (1983a) cites the example of adhere in this connection. The verb has derivatives such as adhesion, adhesive, adherent, adherence which relate to different senses of the verb. Cowie asks:

What consequences can these contrastive relationships have for the design of a productive dictionary? One possible approach is to say that since the sentences:

He adheres to another political party He is an adherent of another political party His adherence is to another political party

are all transformationally related (as alternative realisations of the same collocation adhere + political + party) they, and the derivatives they contain, should all appear in the same entry. Conversely, since adhere (in the sense of ‘stick’), adhesion and adhesive represent a quite distinct line of derivation they should be treated in a separate entry.

The problem with such a decision, Cowie observes, is that, if carried to a logical conclusion, retrieval of individual items may become too taxing for the learner since the existence of too many separate entries entails the need for much cross-referencing. But the alternative strategy of grouping complex forms together because of spelling similarities and thus ease of learner access can be counter-productive and may not necessarily assist learner interpret-ation and production. Two observinterpret-ations can be reiterated here: it is difficult to draw a line between sufficiently detailed exemplificatory information and brevity and economy in the entry; it is often the simplest and most common words which contract the most complex syntactic and collocational partner-ships. To these can be added the observation that the balance between access-ing and interpretaccess-ing related lexical items is an extremely delicate one within pedagogical lexicography.