Heming Yong and Jing Peng. 2022. A Sociolinguistic History of British English Lexicography

Abstract

British English lexicography, which can be traced back to the Anglo-Saxon period, has a history of at least 400 years (Cowie 2009). Since the 1970s, many books have conducted an in-depth investigation into English lexicography from various perspectives. Some books intend to provide a comprehensive account (e.g. Zgusta 1971; Landau 1989; Svesnén 1993; Atkins and Rundell 2008; Fontenelle 2008; Svesnén 2009); some aim at a historical description (e.g. Collison 1982; Cowie 2002, 2009; Béjoint 2010; Miyoshi 2017); and some endeavour to reveal the current limitations of present-day English dictionaries and propose some solutions to these limitations (e.g. Dixon 2018). There are also some books focusing on the history of world lexicography (e.g. Considine 2019), or the lexicography of one single language (e.g. Yong and Peng (2008) on Chinese lexicography). However, most existing studies of British English lexicography are confined to individual lexicographic works of a particular period of time and pay little attention to the impacts of changes in society, culture, science, and technology on the evolution of lexicography. They lack historical continuity, subject coverage, and interdisciplinary perspectives, failing to fully reveal the evolutional characteristics and patterns of British English lexicography over different periods of time (p. 4).