Technical details
| Full title | A Way with Words: Recent Advances in Lexical Theory and Analysis. A Festschrift for Patrick Hanks |
| Author | Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (ed.) |
| Release date | 6 July 2010 |
| Size | 245 x 170 mm |
| Pages | 384 pp. |
| Binding | Hardback |
| ISBN | 978-9970-101-01-6 |
| Price | 59.95 EUR | 170,000 Ugandan Shs |
A Festschrift for Patrick Hanks
This landmark publication is a Festschrift for the famous corpus linguist and lexicographer Patrick Hanks, presented on the occasion of his 70th birthday. It is, however, far more than a dutiful collection of tributes. The 20 essays have a coherent theme – the relationship between word use and word meaning in the context of dictionary making and analysis of corpus evidence. These thought-provoking essays deal with major issues in every aspect of current thinking about the lexicon, some from a theoretical point of view, others from a more practical point of view.
This book is essential reading for everyone interested in meaning, the lexicon, dictionaries, and corpus analysis.
Praise for Patrick Hanks
“Dedicated to someone whose contribution to the field of corpus-based lexical analysis is second to none.”
Sue Atkins
“For the last thirty years, Patrick Hanks has been forging an account of how words and phrases work that reconciles the challenge of the philosophy with the detail.”
Adam Kilgarriff & Pavel Rychlý
“I shall recall just one thing, a thing by which Patrick amazed me, as I am sure he has amazed many others since. What he showed me is how in English, whatever familiar verb you choose, if you set out a large and representative enough collection of contexts into which that verb will fit, then no other verb, however apparently similar in sense, will fit into all these contexts. Cumulatively, the complements for the verb add up to a unique pattern which rules out all candidates but one.”
David Wiggins
“Every lexicographer has their interests. I have had the opportunity to work with a number of different lexicographers. Many lexicographers study butterflies, but Patrick likes 'central and typical' moths.”
Ken Church
“As a master of elegance, Johnson’s natural successor is Patrick Hanks. And if Hanks’s friends and colleagues can see more clearly, it is because we are standing on the shoulders of a giant.”
Michael Rundell
Book contents
For the past 50 years, linguists – with their focus on syntax – and lexicographers – with their focus on defining meaning – have largely ignored each other or even been mutually hostile. In recent years, however, more attention in linguistics has switched to the lexicon, while lexicographers have begun to see the need for better theoretical foundations. The two disciplines – linguistics and lexicography – are now beginning to recognize the benefits of interaction. This book, in honour of Patrick Hanks, brings together essays on major theoretical issues in the lexical with essays on issues in practical analysis of the lexicon by some of the world’s leading contemporary linguists, lexicographers, and philosophers with an interest in words and meaning. It represents both a dialogue and a variety of significant approaches to fundamental issues in this topic.
The opening paper is a discussion by the late John Sinclair of the fundamentals of phraseology and core meaning, building on his theoretical approach to the relationship between collocation and meaning. The first part also contains important papers by Wilks (on preference semantics), Pustejovsky & Rumshisky (on the generative lexicon), Mel’čuk (on the government pattern), and Wiggins (on paradoxes), advancing our theoretical understanding of the nature of word meaning. The second part is concerned with the computation of lexical relations, and contains contributions by Ken Church (on corpus size), Grefenstette (on the number of concepts), David & Louise Guthrie (on adjectives that predict noun classes), Geyken (on support verb constructions), Pala & Rychlý (on word sketches), Cinková, Holub & Smejkalová (on the pattern dictionary of English verbs), and Jezek & Frontini (on the Patternbank). The third part links through to lexical analysis and dictionary writing, with landmark papers by Rosamund Moon (on idioms), Atkins (on a new lexicographical database), Kilgarriff & Rychlý (on semi-automatic dictionary drafting), Bogaards (on theory in lexicography), Bańko (on the Polish COBUILD), Green (on argot), and Rundell (on elegance in defining). The editor, Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, also included an account of the life and work of Patrick Hanks.
Table of contents
Introduction
- Getting to the Bottom of How Language Works
Gilles-Maurice de Schryver
Ghent University
University of the Western Cape
TshwaneDJe HLT
Part I: Theoretical Aspects and Background
- Defining the Definiendum
John Sinclair (†)
From 1965 until 2000, Professor of Modern English Language, University of Birmingham - Very Large Lexical Entries and the Boundary Between Linguistic and Knowledge Structures
Yorick Wilks
University of Oxford - Mechanisms of Sense Extension in Verbs
James Pustejovsky & Anna Rumshisky
Brandeis University - The Government Pattern in the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary
Igor Mel’čuk
University of Montreal - The Paradox of Analysis and the Paradox of Synonymy
David Wiggins
From 1994 until 2000, Wykeham Professor of Logic, University of Oxford
Part II: Computing Lexical Relations
- More is More
Kenneth W. Church
Johns Hopkins University - Estimating the Number of Concepts
Gregory Grefenstette
Exalead - Identifying Adjectives that Predict Noun Classes
David Guthrie & Louise Guthrie
The University of Sheffield - Statistical Variations of German Support Verb Constructions in Very Large Corpora
Alexander Geyken
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities - A Case Study in Word Sketches – Czech Verb vidět ‘see’
Karel Pala & Pavel Rychlý
Masaryk University - The Lexical Population of Semantic Types in Hanks’s PDEV
Silvie Cinková, Martin Holub & Lenka Smejkalová
Charles University in Prague - From Pattern Dictionary to Patternbank
Elisabetta Jezek & Francesca Frontini
Pavia University
Part III: Lexical Analysis and Dictionary Writing
- Words that Spring to Mind: Idiom, Allusion, and Convention
Rosamund Moon
University of Birmingham - The DANTE Database: Its Contribution to English Lexical Research, and in Particular to Complementing the FrameNet Data
Sue Atkins
Lexicography MasterClass Ltd. - Semi-Automatic Dictionary Drafting
Adam Kilgarriff & Pavel Rychlý
Lexical Computing Ltd.
Lexicography MasterClass Ltd.
&
Masaryk University - Lexicography: Science without Theory?
Paul Bogaards
Leiden University
Editor: International Journal of Lexicography - The Polish COBUILD and its Influence on Polish Lexicography
Mirosław Bańko
University of Warsaw
Polish Scientific Publishers PWN - ARGOT: The Flesh Made Word
Jonathon Green
Independent Scholar - Defining Elegance
Michael Rundell
Lexicography MasterClass Ltd.
Macmillan English Dictionaries
Short biography of Patrick Hanks
Patrick Hanks (born in 1940) is a linguistic theorist and empirical corpus analyst, also an onomastician, but above all he is a lexicographer. He has played a central role in editing no less than four major, highly original dictionaries of the English language – the Hamlyn Encyclopedic World Dictionary (1971), the Collins Dictionary of the English Language (1979), the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987), and The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998); as well as three important dictionaries of personal names – A Dictionary of Surnames (1988) and A Dictionary of First Names (1990), both compiled with Flavia Hodges, and the Dictionary of American Family Names (2003). However, it is for his work as a corpus linguist, building on foundations laid by the late John Sinclair, for which he will probably be best remembered.
From 1983 to 1990 Patrick was managing editor (subsequently editorial director) of the COBUILD project at the University of Birmingham. From 1990 to 2000 he was chief editor of current English dictionaries at Oxford University Press. Since 2000 he has held research and teaching posts at Brandeis University, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Masaryk University, Charles University in Prague, the University of Wolverhampton, and the University of the West of England.
Short biography of the editor, Gilles-Maurice de Schryver
Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (born in 1971) is an assistant professor in the department of African languages and cultures at Ghent University, Belgium, and an extraordinary professor in the Xhosa department at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He is also a founding member of African Language Technology, the President of Afrilex, an elected board member of Euralex, Asialex as well as Australex, initiator of PangaeaLex, and co-founder of TshwaneDJe HLT – makers of TshwaneLex.
Gilles-Maurice is mainly interested in corpus and dictionary topics for the African languages, and increasingly also in language-independent lexicography software. His main research results are invariably published in the International Journal of Lexicography and Lexikos, while his own corpus-driven dictionaries for the Bantu languages are published by Oxford University Press – his latest the Oxford Bilingual School Dictionary: Zulu and English (2010).