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
6 Learners' dictionaries Dictionaries designed to help learners of a language obviously have very different objectives from those designed to act as reference books for native speakers, and their strategies would be expected to reflect these objectives. Despite their more limited scope and simplistic approach to definition, the original hard word dictionaries have significant elements in common with learner's dictionaries. It is also true to say that all of the dictionaries quoted so far, with the exception of the OED , regard themselves as having a pedagogic role. O'Kill (1990) points out that even Johnson's Dictionary , although 'implicitly addressed to a more sophisticated audience' was published in an abridged form and became 'a popular pedagogic tool for many years' (O'Kill, 1990, p. 10). Nuccorini (1993) extends the teaching role to all dictionaries: Ogni opera di lessicografia ha un aspetto didactico. Nel consultare un dizionario si cerca prevalentemente qualcosa che non si sa o di cui non si é sicuri, ed é in questo senso, nel rispondere alle domande o alle incertezze di chi li consulta, che i dizionari insegnano sempre qualcosa, anche se questo qualcosa varia da lingua a lingua, da situazione a situazione, da epoca a epoca, e, sopratutto, da dizionario a dizionario. 2 (Nuccorini, 1993, p.39) This places every user of a dictionary in the role of a learner. The crucial question for the consideration of a given dictionary as descriptive or prescriptive must then depend on the nature of 'questo qualcosa', 'this something' which the dictionary provides as an answer to the user's questions. In the case of learners' dictionaries, changes in the nature of 'this something' can be traced to the end of the nineteenth century. 2 Every lexicographic exercise has a didactic aspect. In consulting a dictionary you most often seek something which you do not know or of which you are not sure, and it is in this sense, in answering the questions or the uncertainties of those who consult them, that dictionaries teach something, even if this something varies from language to language, from situation to situation, from age to age, and, above all, from dictionary to dictionary. (Author's translation) 28
