Lexicography Work

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A while back, we had a call about the difference between a lexicographer, a linguist, and a wordsmith.

And we kind of touched on linguist and wordsmith, but Grant, I don’t really think we gave a good idea about what a lexicographer does all day.

And since you’re a lexicographer, maybe you can tell us.

Oh, yeah, sure.

What do you do all day?

Well, a little Twitter, a little Facebook.

I go to FARC once in a while, slash dot Metafilter, all the big…

What? No, I’m kidding.

Well, I’ll tell you what I’m working on right now.

I’m working on a business English dictionary for people who speak English as a second language.

And this is for Cambridge University Press.

It’s a great little project.

You can imagine that if you’re coming from another country where you don’t speak English as a first language, you need some help with some of the more arcane jargon, right?

Oh, yeah, sure.

And so the team of great lexicographers has gotten together and they’re putting this together.

Like you.

Well, you know, just part of the team.

Together the team is great.

And so the first thing that we have to do, of course, is to find the list of words that need to be defined.

What is the language that’s used out there that somebody might encounter?

So you look in all the different aspects of business and finance and real estate and property and law and all the places that this language comes together, and you make the list of the words.

And then you go to your databases, and I said, you know, newspaper archives and corpora.

Do you know what corpora is?

Well, I imagine it’s from the Latin for body.

Yeah, it’s a body of text where you take a lot of text from a wide variety of sources.

You kind of balance it out so it’s not too much one kind of text or another.

And then you set it up in such a way that you can analyze language within that text and figure out what words go together.

For example, if I was working on the entry for income tax, which I did indeed do, I might want to also do an entry for income tax deduction.

And by looking at the corpus, I can figure out how common the expression is, how people use it.

Is it an American expression or a British expression?

Is there any other kind of interesting stuff?

The verbs are, you know, for verbs you look, is it transitive?

Is it intransitive?

For nouns you look, is it a count noun or a mass noun?

All of these different things that a non-native speaker of English would really need to know.

Well, where do you find the corpus?

Is there one website?

Well, there are some corpora out there that are public.

There’s one done by Brigham Young University, which is really great.

But generally the dictionary publishers make their own.

And so they’re very different from each other.

They might use the same software, but they’ve chosen to balance them in different ways, maybe a little more British or a little less technical or a little more Internet or a little, you know, somebody has the economist and somebody else doesn’t.

And in this way, you can really show how language is used naturally.

You’ve probably heard me talk about looking at the databases when we take calls from listeners, right?

Yeah.

And a lot of times I’m looking at that kind of corpus.

I’m looking at the corpus that can really inform my instincts.

Because let’s face it, even though I have native speaker instincts, it’s not enough when you’re doing a dictionary for other people.

You can’t just trust yourself.

You need to look across the body of usage to find out if your instincts are true.

And if they’re not true, then you have to put that down, not just what you think.

It’s not what you think that matters.

It’s what you can prove that matters.

Well, hey, if you want to talk about language, call us 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Or you can email us. That address is words@waywordradio.org.