Historical principles vs. synchronic approaches

Although there have been numerous studies of both synchronic and historical lexicographical features of dictionaries, few of them have been directly comparative, and this might seem surprising. In this chapter, a number of questions are addressed. What is the context and background for synchronic and historical approaches in dictionaries, and what does it mean to make this distinction in the first place? What are the key distinguishing features of synchronic and historical descriptions, and why do they matter, for the user or for anyone else? Also, what are the individual challenges and issues in the two approaches? As well as an overview of some key moments in the development of the debate, the questions will be approached by means of a case study – of the word “capital” – and analysis of specific lexicographical features. The examples are drawn from English language lexicography and are focused on general dictionaries (as opposed to dictionaries specially designed for children or learners of English), but there is an expectation that many of the observations can be generalized to apply to other languages and lexicographical contexts. Introduction: Context and Background For the purposes of this chapter, the terms “historical” and “synchronic” are defined with respect to dictionaries as follows: a dictionary which follows a “synchronic” approach is one which is concerned primarily with the language as it exists at a particular time (in practice, the present day). A “historical” dictionary or a dictionary with a “diachronic” approach is one which is concerned primarily with language as it has developed and evolved through time. The term “historical” is used in preference to “diachronic,” given that it was the term in the nineteenth century applied to dictionaries and language study. The habitual use of the contrastive terms “synchronic” and “historical” (or “diachronic”) in relation to language (and dictionaries) is relatively recent. The nineteenth century was characterized by the growth in historical linguistics and the establishment of some of the greatest dictionaries on historical principles, including the Grimm brothers’ Deutsches Worterbuch (first volumes published 1854, initiated in the 1830s) and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, published 1884–1928, initiated in the late 1850s). In English, the term “historical”with reference to language study is recorded in the first half of the nineteenth century (see OED’s sense 2c, and the citation from 1832). In this context, study of language was seen as an account of evolutionary development, whose aim was tracing words from their earliest origins to the present day. Historical dictionaries were, and are, primarily documentary accounts rather than practical tools for using the language. According to Richard C. Trench, author of the influential paper On some deficiencies in our English Dictionaries: “A Dictionary is an historical monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view” (Trench 1860, p. 6). However, it is not true to suggest that the editors of these dictionaries did not consider the interplay between diachronic and synchronic. In his “General Explanations,” James Murray describes the temporal nature of “the living language” as well as the impermanence of any synchronic view of the language, which he described as “no more permanent in *Email: judy.pearsall@oup.com International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-45369-4_3-1 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015