In this paper I would like to touch on two interrelated issues. One issue is the usefulness of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries of English aimed at learners and non-native users of English, the other is the presence of such dic-tionaries on the marketplace as commercial products, and, more specifically, as brands. In fact there is an ideological, or perhaps realistic, or perhaps cynical, approach that pedagogical dictionaries — especially monolingual ones — are first of all products, created and sold by the publishers to make money (PHILLIPSON, 1992, cf. also KERNERMAN, 1999). The needs of users are of sec-ondary importance.
If one looks at the available literature on the use of dictionaries in the pro-cess of studying English as a foreign language1one finding recurs: users prefer bilingual dictionaries to monolingual ones (for reviews of the literature cf.
PIOTROWSKI, 1994 b; LEW, 2004; POLUSZYŃSKI, 2006). This finding is quite sur-prising when one takes into account the effort that has been going on for over 60 years into making the users believe that what they primarily need is a mono-lingual dictionary. What is even more surprising perhaps is that even though the students apparently do not think they need monolingual dictionaries, there are more and more titles available on the market and the dictionary industry, espe-cially in the UK, seems to flourish. What this seems to indicate is that students (and perhaps teachers) are persuaded into buying a product which they do not use very much, which means that it is highly likely that they do not need it.
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1 This relates to other languages as well, however, English is very well researched.
What is also interesting is that the dictionary use habit seems to be deeply in-grained: students buy dictionaries because they “feel” they need them (P O-LUSZYŃSKI, 2006).
Students prefer bilingual dictionaries over monolingual ones for reasons that I discussed in my 1994 book (PIOTROWSKI, 1994 b), and in my opinion the argu-ments are still valid (cf. also LEW, 2004). In short, in so-called passive use, which dominates, while both the monolingual and the bilingual dictionary can confirm (or not) the hypothesis about the meaning of an item in text (and this is the most important task of dictionary use for users), users prefer the bilingual dictionary because the first language in which the explanations of meaning are coded is the fastest and most reliable key to the cognitive structures in their minds that they have.
However, even the very terms the monolingual dictionary and the bilingual dictionary (for language learners) are too wide in this context. We can attempt to look more precisely at which dictionaries the learners do use. In doing so I will use two independent large-scale surveys carried out in Poland (LEW, 2004; POLUSZYŃSKI, 2006) among learners at secondary and tertiary education levels. One question that was asked was about specific titles of dictionaries in use. While quite a number of users simply do not know the name of the dictio-nary, hence showing again that dictionaries are considered to be anonymous
“natural forces” in the world of text and language, what is striking about the an-swers in which specific titles did appear was the similarity of the titles, or, more correctly, of the publishing houses. Actually the lists can be read as lists of established dictionary brands in Poland, thus showing brand recognition (and loyalty) on the part of the students. It is also clear that learners use me-dium-size dictionaries, both monolingual and bilingual, rather than fully-fledged big ones. Thus, for the monolingual dictionaries Oxford Wordpower emerges as the market leader in the surveys, and the publisher, Oxford Univer-sity Press, for the bilingual dictionaries the Grzebieniowski dictionary as pub-lished (in various versions) by Langenscheidt and other publishing houses.
It is clear that it is not the quality that counts, as the dictionary by GRZEBIENIOWSKI, published first in 1954, was badly outdated in the 2000s2, and it is difficult to see what qualities distinguish Oxford Wordpower from similar dictionaries by other publishers. It is also interesting in this context that Oxford Wordpower is a semi-bilingual dictionary, with both definitions in English and Polish equivalents, so most probably it is used as a bilingual dictionary.
However, one may conclude, basing on the results of the surveys, that large monolingual pedagogical dictionaries are apparently aimed at the wrong audi-ence. The most typical learner seems to be satisfied with a medium-size
dictio-2 Cf. PIOTROWSKI(2001 a) for a history of English and Polish dictionaries, and PIOTROWSKI
(2001 b) for a bibliography of bilingual dictionaries with English and Polish.
nary. There are indeed other authors who think that the unabridged pedagogical dictionary is in fact not pedagogical at all, i.e. it is not suitable for the average learner of English.
So far, the most attention in pedagogical lexicography is consistently devoted to advanced English learner's dictionaries, which really cater for a minority of users (who are more users than learners of English).
That may be part of deeply-rooted misconceptions in this field — ap-parently due to historical and commercial factors rather than didactic or realistic ones — causing a virtual conspiracy of publishers, lexicog-raphers, and teachers. However, few non-native learners of English are
„advanced”; most of them are plain average, and ever more are on a yet lower level.
(KERNERMAN, 1999: 1)
Thus for many reasons the ‘true’ pedagogical dictionary seems to be the smaller one, and the medium-size dictionary in fact meets most of the needs of the learner. Unabridged dictionaries are getting larger and larger, and, in con-trast to what the publishers say, more and more complex. Who are they for, then? Obviously they are for those people who are non-native professional users of English: teachers, translators, researchers, who may derive most profit from the dictionaries. This market, however, is obviously not as extensive as the one for learners of English as a foreign language.
Therefore my discussion in what follows will be concerned with dictionary publishers and various publishing practices, and, more precisely, with consider-ing what marketconsider-ing devices the publishers employ to convince the user that they need a new edition of a dictionary. These devices are quite typical of what we find in the market of native-speaker dictionaries. One conspicuous feature is the use of a keyword that helps to show the users what product they have in hand, what they can expect. In the case of American dictionaries the keyword is Web-ster, as traditionally used by the Merriam-Webster Company, the name yet is now a generic word that any publisher can use (cf. PIOTROWSKI, 1994 b), and now used also by, for instance, Random House and numerous other publishers.
In the case of pedagogical dictionaries the keywords are evidently the words learner and advanced: in the title of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2007) the former word has been used since the 1stedition (1948), and the latter since the 2nd (1963). At present out of five large dictionaries four use the word learner and three use the word advanced, after modifying their previous titles.
Ironically, though in the title of Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English we can find neither advanced not learner, in publicity materials they do use the term: “The only Full Colour Advanced Learner’s Dictionary” (http://www.
pearsonlongman.com/ldoce/about.html).
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Are there any other marketing devices that we can find? I will very briefly discuss three of them, pointing to the fact that the features are usually useless to a learner of English, they can be useful perhaps to a near-native user, who will, however, preferably use a large native speaker dictionary for these features.
What the publishers typically boast about in native-speaker dictionaries is the high number of entries in their dictionary, or the excellent coverage of new words, or some new ‘revolutionary’ feature not present in other dictionaries. All these claims are also used in the context of EFL dictionaries, for example in the blurbs on the covers of the dictionaries.
The first claim is, however, unreliable, because there are no standard meth-ods for measuring the number of entries in dictionaries, therefore the figures cannot be compared from dictionary to dictionary. Further, the more entries a dictionary has the less reliable the methods of inclusion are, more ‘objective’
frequency counts fail beyond a certain threshold and the inclusion is on a sub-jective basis. Thus, though the large monolingual dictionaries for learners have probably a very similar number of entries, their word lists differ by as much as 30%.
All these problems intensify when the other claim — coverage of new items
— is concerned. There is no method of estimating whether a new word — i.e.
a new coinage or a new meaning — will stay in the language or not, and the life of fashionable words is very short. Moreover, the learner usually seeks ad-vice on frequent items, not on those very infrequent, and new words are typical of the latter variety. What is interesting is that the term ‘new word’ is appar-ently used in the meaning ‘new to this dictionary’, because an analysis of those new words in the editions of the Big Four from 1995 revealed that only about 11% of ‘new words’ date from the 1970s or later (AYTO, 1999: 153). The re-maining ones are ‘old’ words, which perhaps gained recognition recently, but which more clearly show the inherently subjective nature of the criteria of in-clusion.
As to the third claim, use of new features, a few years ago, for example, it was a revolutionary feature to use a corpus. Next the publishers competed in terms of the size of the corpus. Now a big corpus alone is not sufficient, a dic-tionary has to use a proper (‘balanced’) corpus, not just any corpus, whatever its size. The most recent vogue, it seems, is the insistence on spoken English corpora, notoriously difficult to collect and to analyze.
In general, a typical situation is when a dictionary from one publisher intro-duces a certain feature, then in their next editions the remaining dictionaries adopt this feature, or at least pay lip-service to its importance, suggesting in vague language that they in fact use it. That was the case with controlled vocab-ulary — use of a strictly limited list of words — employed in definitions, or, more recently, with semantic pointers to relevant senses in long entries, called in guide words, signposts, or short-cuts in various dictionaries.
Thus despite the various claims on innovativeness those dictionaries are of-ten more similar inside than it might appear to a typical user. Of course, I has-ten to add that what is most interesting in them is the differences in the descriptions, which result both from the overall differences in approach and from the fact that there is no one way of describing language, and in particular meaning, in a dictionary. All these similarities are not usually noticed by the user, who typically has and uses one dictionary, and is happy (or not) with what is in it. What the users do notice, however, is the large variety of dictionaries, indeed, a plethora of dictionaries on the shelves in a bookshop.
Can we notice any regularities in the range of dictionaries? In fact we do.
Publishers usually offer dictionaries in series, no matter whether the dictionar-ies are targeted at native or non-native audiences. The situation in Poland might be illustrative here: a typical dictionary series consists of a monolingual dictio-nary, one of ‘foreign’ words, a dictionary of synonyms and a speller. Recently publishers add to this range a dictionary of idioms. Pedagogical dictionaries also come in series. A typical series in the UK consists of a large general dic-tionary, a medium-size one, and a range of still smaller dictionaries. There is also an American version of the medium-size dictionary, and of a smaller dic-tionary. Further, the publishers offer also dictionaries of idioms, phrasal verbs, and a thesaurus-like dictionary (a quick consultation with publishers’ web pages will confirm my description). It is also interesting to note that similar se-ries clearly start appearing for American English.
McCreary and Dolezal offer a sobering insight into this situation: “no matter how far academic and practising lexicographers go in their quest for the ideal dictionary, the reality for all major lexicographic ventures can be reduced to the transaction between publisher and dictionary buyer” (MCCREARY and DOLEZAL, 1999: XII). We might add to this statement that obviously what the users, and their teachers, need when considering buying, and perhaps using, a dictionary is not so much awareness of the linguistic problems of describing a language in a dictionary as awareness of efficient marketing ploys, so that the users will be aware that actually English teaching and learning is a huge indus-try, and what they might usefully read is a book similar to No Logo (KLEIN, 2000) rather than an introduction to lexicography.
REFERENCES
AYTO J. (1999): “Lexical evolution and learners’ dictionaries”. In: HERBST T. and POPP K. (eds.): The Perfect Learners’ Dictionary (?). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 151—160.
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