Focus on the Dictionary User

Abstract

Abstract In the early history of the monolingual learner’s dictionary, three design features in particular came to dominate the plans conceived by lexicographers-though in fact no dictionary published at the time incorporated them all. These were: definitions based on a controlled defining vocabulary that the foreign student could be expected to understand; detailed information about function words, ‘heavy-duty’ lexical words, and verb-patterns (the latter in a specially ‘coded’ form); and coverage of a great number and variety of word-combinations (idioms, collocations, and formulae). If they had been brought together in a single work, those features would have ensured that the decoding and encoding needs of the learner were equally fulfilled, since while the first favours the user wishing to understand the foreign language and the second — grammatical information — s designed to meet the needs of the learner wishing to write in the L2, the third supports activity of both kinds. However, there can be little doubt that both philosophically and in practice Palmer and Hornby favoured the encoding function. At the practical level, as we saw earlier, Palmer’sGEWoverwhelmingly, and Hornby’sISEDto a considerable extent, laid stress on support for the writer and translator. The many years of research devoted to core vocabulary items, and their patterns and uses, were eventually to bear fruit in dictionary information for encoding rather than decoding (Cowie 1983b, 1984).