Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)
Geoff Barnbrook: From description to prescription and back again
indication of the likely route taken by the word during its semantic development. This is, then, the ultimate descriptive English dictionary. Whether it is strictly monolingual is another matter: English can hardly be regarded as one language from the 12th century to the present day, and the differences are greater than merely dialectal or varietal. Certainly, the OED's special requirements impose on it a structure more complex than any other dictionary with more modest aims could ever need. The sample of definition texts from Johnson's Dictionary in section 4.3 above shows the over-formalisation of entries, often with unnecessary repetition of elements that apply to several forms of the same headword, which can beset dictionaries that try to do too much. The OED has no choice: the complexity of its entries is forced on it by the function it is trying to perform. Sweet (1899, p. 141), in a discussion of the ideal dictionary for language teaching purposes, says of the OED that it 'is not, even from a purely scientific and theoretical point of view, a dictionary, but a series of dictionaries digested under one alphabet.' The complexity of its structure is not entirely a bad thing. Although there are some inconsistencies inevitable in the construction of such a vast work entirely by manual means, this monument to nineteenth century perseverance performed amazingly well during its computerization. The section of the preliminary material to the Second Edition that deals with the History of the Oxford English Dictionary (Murray et al., 1989, p.liii) describes the approach adopted to convert the dictionary text to a database: The structure devised by Sir James Murray and used by him and all his successors for writing Dictionary entries was so regular that it was possible to analyse them as if they were sentences of a language with a definite syntax and grammar. This regularity allowed the use of an automatic entry parser as part of the conversion process, and the results of that process now allow computer readable versions of the OED to be accessed in a wide variety of different ways, providing scope for fairly sophisticated computer analysis 1. ' A brief example of the possibilities can be found in Barnbrook (1996, pp. 163165). 27
