Chapter 1 - Dictionary Typologies

Summary

Beginning with the Romance philologist Yakov Malkiel, scholars have attempted to construct typologies adequate to the description of dictionaries in all their variety since the 1950s. Typologies are useful tools. They require that we abstract the distinctive features of various dictionary types by close examination and comparison of features, and they help us grasp the dictionary phenomenon by organizing it analytically. But typologies have limitations. For instance, on occasion, dictionaries cross types. Recent typologies tend to view the dictionary as a stable genre of language reference work, but people insist on making dictionaries for other reasons: some dictionaries enregister dialects and slang and other nonstandard language varieties, such that the dictionaries are more about maintaining social boundaries and promoting regional or social identities by means of enregisterment. Still others are facetious or in some other way devoted not to reference but to entertainment, not that the two are always mutually exclusive. Because dictionaries tend to confound attempts to typologize them, some scholars have tried to restrict the categories “dictionary” and “lexicography” to exclude the confounding texts and those who make them.