Keywords: early modern lexicography, Robert Cawdrey, Edmund Coote, archaizers, John Cheke.

When Robert Cawdrey printed the first edition of his highly successful Table Alphabeticall (1604), his main focus was on terms that were “hardµ and “borrowedµ, which he proposed to expound with the help of “plaine English wordsµ. While Cawdrey’s interests were mainly educational, it is possible to argue that his linguistic ideology was protectionist rather than expansive, in line with the positions of sixteenth-century purists and archaizers. In this article, Cawdrey’s paratextual apparatus and his lexical items are sifted for evidence of the lexicographer’s affinity with such key anti-neologizing figures as Thomas Wilson and John Cheke.

Keywords: eighteenth-century lexicography, John Kersey, women in dictionaries, sexism, gender, ideology.

This paper investigates the representation of women in A New English Dictionary (1702 and 1713 editions) and Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708), respectively the first English universal general-purpose and abridged dictionaries, both of them compiled by John Kersey. The words used to refer to ‘all things women’ in the English language, as they are selected and lexicographically described by Kersey, are analysed in order to provide evidence of the nature of dictionaries as cultural objects and the role played by lexicographers as propagators of the shared values and ideology of their age and society.

Keywords: Scots, Scottish English, Late Modern English.

The representation of Scots in dictionaries has a long and fascinating history. This contribution aims to outline the ways in which it has crossed the border between monolingual and bilingual lexicography, while still failing to result in a dictionary in which both headwords and definitions are in Scots. To this end, I pay attention to the historical specificity of the variety under discussion, especially since Late Modern times. Within this framework, both normative attitudes and usage may help account for the ways in which – over time – entries have been selected and prefatory material has been compiled. Finally, some remarks are offered on the situation today and what developments might be expected.

Keywords: bilingual lexicography, Italian, English, political correctness, offensive language.

The aim of this essay is to investigate the attitude of three bilingual English- Italian dictionaries towards political correctness. One hundred words labelled as offensive in relation to ethnicity, sexual preference, physical/ mental disability, appearance, religion and politics were randomly selected from the latest editions of five English monolingual learner’s dictionaries and were examined in different editions of Hazon, Ragazzini, and Sansoni, starting from the first editions published in the 1960s and ending with the editions published in the first decade of the 2000s. The findings show that all together the three dictionaries trace a realistic picture of the evolution of political correctness from the 1960s; taken individually, however, they are not politically correct to the same extent. From a synchronic point of view, Ragazzini2010 is the most politically correct; from a diachronic point of view, Hazon1990 plays an important part in diffusing political correctness in the subsequent editions of the other dictionaries.

Keywords: Africanism, Caribbean English, culture, phraseology, transatlantic slave trade, worldview.

Among the most characteristic features of Caribbean English (CE) lies its phraseology, namely the lexicalisation of concepts through linguistic specificities whose etymological roots are to be found in West African languages. Not only are such peculiarities widespread in spoken CE and English-based Creoles, but they are also illustrated in the extensive body of Caribbean English literature. By adopting an overarching definition of phraseology, this article aims at showing that phraseological units typically used in CE work as a cultural agent. Within the vast inventory of African substrate survivals, attention is paid to compound-like vocabulary items which are word-for-word translations of West African idioms into English rather than ex novo combinations of English lexemes. A sample of eight commonly-used compounds, all referring to parts of the body, was extracted from the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage and then compared with entries – if any – in the Oxford English Dictionary Online and the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Online, the two reference works that are the pillars of English: although such phrasemes employ Standard English (SE) words, they do not mirror conventional SE lexical practices. Therefore, by looking at the images conveyed through their culture-specific phraseology, the article depicts the distinctly non-European worldview of West Africans transplanted to the Caribbean by European colonisers during the transatlantic slave trade.

Keywords: Anglicism, borrowing, phraseology, loanword lexicography.

This paper illustrates the types of English borrowings contained in the Global Anglicism Database (GLAD) with a special focus on multi-word and phraseological units. GLAD is a newly-planned online lexicographic tool, currently in progress, designed to store the input of English borrowings in an open-ended number of languages. One of the major challenges posed by the building of GLAD’s macrostructure is bringing together English borrowings in languages that have been differently influenced by English, not only because of diverse genetic and historical contacts but also because of different ways of integrating foreign loans, depending on their systems (through direct borrowing, adaptation or calquing) and their degree of openness to ‘Anglicization’. Types of multi-word and phraseological units are presented and classified, drawing on entries already recorded in GLAD.

Keywords: fascism, fascist terms, Mussolini, English lexicography.

This paper analyses how English lexicography has received the fascist terminology derived from the Italian party ideology and put into practice by Mussolini during his leadership. The research has examined the online Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Online after taking into consideration the huge literature on Mussolini’s language and cultural policy. In addition, several lexicographical sources such as the Dizionario di politica (1940), the new Dizionario del fascismo (De Grazia and Luzzato 2002) and current Italian lexicographic data banks such as the TRECCANI and DIFIT online have been consulted to compare collected data. Findings have suggested interesting lexicological and cultural considerations, mainly by exploring the handling of specific keywords such as FASCISMO, FASCISTA, FASCISM, FASCIST, MUSSOLINI and DUCE in both the English dictionary texts. A significant number of terms related to Italian fascism entered English as adapted or non-adapted borrowings, or as calques and semantic loanwords. Some neologisms acquired just their negative connotation related to fascist ideology while the meaning of others has evolved over time. Finally from a cultural standpoint, several OED quotations have given an outlook on the authoritative literature of reference chosen by lexicographers and on their regard for the Italian regime and its dictator.

Keywords: English aspectual verbs, ingressive predicates, start, dictionaries.

This paper analyses the lexicographic entries for the verb start in the online editions of two unabridged dictionaries of English, namely the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Unabridged, as well as in one learner’s dictionary, i.e. the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, in order to examine how this highly frequent ingressive aspectualiser is treated in terms of the evolution of its various senses and by contrasting it with its near-synonyms. The study shows that dictionaries need to provide clearer and finer-grained information about the areas of overlap between start, begin, initiate and commence. Although these predicates share a similar semantic nucleus and may to a large extent enter the same syntactic constructions, they differ at a more subtle pragmatic level. This meaning dimension does not seem to be appropriately accounted for in dictionaries.

Keywords: children’s dictionaries, edutainment, engagement, proximity, user-orientation.

This paper addresses the construction of ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings (Halliday 1985) in children’s dictionaries that are primarily a form of edutainment (Buckingham and Scanlon 2002). Working against the background of research into multimodal lexicography (Lew 2010; Chan 2011; Liu 2015; 2017) in the electronic dictionary age (De Schryver 2003; Tarp 2008; Granger 2012), I shall concentrate on the interplay of content, form and composition space in the Oxford Children’s Dictionary (2015) and the Oxford Illustrated Children’s Dictionary (2018) vis-à-vis other paper dictionaries within the family. As will be seen, joint compositions of intentionally co-present text and images interact in diverse ways and to different extents in the interest of user-orientation on the content level, guidance, and user-engagement and proximity on the textual and interpersonal levels.

Keywords: specialised lexicography, English monolingual medical dictionaries, cognitive function, Italian sports sciences undergraduates.

Today information tends to be increasingly specialised. Moreover, English is the language of most scientific literature worldwide. Within this context, English dictionaries are very important reference tools which help improve exchange among members of a given professional community. Of the different specialised languages, the medical one perhaps undergoes the fastest changes parallel to the continuous and rapid advances in the medical sciences. However, research on medical lexicography seems to lack studies on monolingual medical dictionaries – especially from a comparative, both synchronic and diachronic, point of view. This paper aims to offer a contrastive analysis of some features of two of the most influential and authoritative British and American monolingual medical dictionaries. More precisely, the latest edition (2017) of the British Black’s Medical Dictionary and the latest edition (2006) of the American Stedman’s Medical Dictionary will be compared to two of their corresponding earlier editions published, respectively, in 1981 and in 1982. A corpus of entries concerning the skeletal system and related disorders will be investigated, since the aim of the analysis is also to highlight the importance of including the two dictionaries in the curricula of Italian University sports sciences degree courses. Emphasis will be placed on how the data is treated at both a macrostructural and a microstructural level. Particular attention will be focused on the organisation of meaning, as well as on the important cognitive function displayed in the treatment of data.

Keywords: usage, authority, stance, descriptivism, prescriptivism, lexicography.

This paper deals with the concepts of usage, authority and stance in the field of lexicography, with special reference to the first edition of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (W3), the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and different editions of learner’s dictionaries up to the latest ones. The main aim is to compare and assess different dictionary-making policies and their outcomes on the basis of the more or less overt role played by the interpretations and implementations of the above-mentioned concepts of usage, authority and stance and their interconnections with descriptivism and prescriptivism. Scholarly approaches to the concepts of usage, authority, and stance are presented in section 1 to outline the scientific background to their pervasiveness in dictionary-making policies. The definitions of the words usage, authority and stance given in W3 and in the OED, whose outstanding positions in the lexicographical field are undisputed, are then analysed in section 2. The related definitions of descriptivism and prescriptivism are compared and their application and instantiation are exemplified by the treatment of woman question (as a lexical item) in the OED, as representative of its historical perspective, and of ain’t in W3, as the symbol of its lexicographic breakthrough (section 3). Section 4 focuses on Learner’s Dictionaries and their specific pedagogical role with reference to usage, authority and stance, and on their definitions of ain’t in different editions, to see if that headword has undergone socio-cultural changes in time. A few concluding remarks are offered in section 5.