Henri Bejoint, The Lexicography of English.

Abstract

Professor Henri Béjoint probably no longer needs to be introduced to IJL readers. A former President of the European Association for Lexicography, this Professor Emeritus at the University of Lyon has published extensively on lexicography (whether monolingual or bilingual), including Tradition and Innovation in Modern English Dictionaries (OUP, 1994). He decided to strike again, this time with a magistral Lexicography of English, which, to quote the blurb on the cover of the book, ‘looks at how English words have been recorded, dissected and displayed in Great Britain and the USA from the seventeenth century to the present’. The first forty pages of The Lexicography of English are devoted to an attempt to define the word dictionary itself. All aspects of dictionaries are closely scrutinized in order to highlight the main elements and distinguish dictionaries from other reference works such as encyclopedias, grammars and other lists of words. The headings of the first chapter are worth quoting here, since they give a flavour of what kind of discussion the reader can expect to find in the book: