From Practice to Theory: the Evolution of English Pre-corpus Monolingual Learner’s Dictionaries
From Practice to Theory: the Evolution of English Pre-corpus Monolingual Learner’s Dictionaries

Summary/Abstract: The paper traces the progress of a typically English lexicographic product: the monolingual learner’s dictionary, during the pre-corpus period, by looking at the accretion of its defining features: treatment of phraseology, vocabulary control, presence of grammar information, ordering of headwords, contextual information, restricted defining vocabulary and defining style in the works of the precursors and those of the Vocabulary Control Movement. As such, it presents the defining features of the genre and offers an overview of the main contributions made by the early lexicographers from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Samuel Johnson, Harold Palmer, A.S. Hornby, and Michael West.

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