Bjoint, Henri. The Lexicography of English: from Origins to Present . Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2010. 2.3.

2 Samuel Johnson The main event in the evolution of English lexicography in the eighteenth century was the publication of Samuel Johnsons Dictionary in 1755. Johnson, wholly unknown to the public, because all his work had been published anonymously(McAdam and Milne 1963: vii), had taken up an idea that was current among many intellectuals of the time and that some publishers were ready to back: to produce n authoritative dictionary of the English language. He started work in 1746 and in 1747 published his Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, addressed to the Right Honorable Philip Dormer, Earl of Chesterfield. He had signed a contract with a consortium of booksellers that granted him money to pay his expenses, including six amanuenses, whose job was to copy his notes and annotations of the texts he consulted. He had been allowed a period of preparation of three years, but the dictionary was published after nine years, on 15 April 1755, under the title A Dictionary of the English Language, in which the Words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the best Writers ... By Samuel Johnson, A.M. It was bound n two large folio volumes, each the size of a lectern Bible(McAdam and Milne 1963: viii) or in four volumes (Hitchings 2005: 1992). The first page of the dictionary text (not the cover) bore the title A General Dictionary of the English Language. It had about 42,000 entries, a Preface that has been almost unanimously praised as one of the best expressions of the problems of lexicography, a brief history of the English language and grammar. A copy was sent to the French Academy which gives an idea of the ambitions of the author and the Academy in turn promised to repay with a new edition of its own masterpiece as soon as the new edition should appear, which it did in 1761 (Sledd and Kolb 1955: 146). Johnsons dictionary has been closely examined and extensively commented upon. Some have claimed that Johnson was the inventor of modern lexicography, others that he was only following in the steps of his predecessor; some have said that he exerted a profound influence on the evolution of the English language while for others that influence was negligible. As usual, the truth is probably somewhere in between: Johnson did not invent much, but he brought together different elements that had never been assembled before in any single dictionary of English, and he added generous portions of his immense culture and strong personality. In that sense he is undoubtedly one of the leading figures - if not the leading figure - in the history of English lexicography. Johnsons Dictionary had two clearly defined objectives: to explain the words and phrases used in the general intercourse of life, or found in the works of those whom we commonly style polite writers(Preface), and to preserve the purity, and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom(Preface). Thus it was both descriptive and prescriptive. Johnson had all the words that he could find in acceptable sources, hard words and common words, except those that he considered improper, and he also had compounds, phrasal verbs, phrases, etc., which he treated with particular care, one of

the features for which his dictionary was remarkable (Osselton 1986). He had many technical and scientific terms as well as dialect words. [] Johnson had no illusion about the perfection of his achievement: to pursue perfection was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chase the sun, he wrote in the Preface, andEvery other author may aspire to praise, the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach. Still, he thought that on the whole his dictionary was as good as any other: dictionaries, he said, are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to be quite true (Piozzi 1925, in Docherty 2000). [] Despite its imperfections, Johnsons Dictionary was greeted as a great achievement, although it was hardly a commercial success, selling fewer than 4,000 copies in its first 10 years(Benson 2001: 87). The Academia Della Crusca pronounced it perpetual Monument of Fame to the Author'(Sled and Kolb 1955: 110), Coleridge called it most instructive and entertaining book', and Adam Smith agreed in the Edinburgh Review (1755): 'when we compare this book with other dictionaries, the merit of its author appears very extraordinary' (Congleton and Congleton 1984: 15). It was deemed equal, if not superior, to the Dictionnaire of the French Academy. 2.3.3.2 The dictionary using a corpus With Johnson, lexicographers started using a corpus (Osselton 1983: 17): they found the words of their nomenclature in texts rather than in dictionaries and a major criterion for inclusion was usage. Of course it was not called corpus at the time, and it was different from what we now call corpus. The corpus of eighteenth century lexicographers was an open collection of mostly literary texts from reputable authors, from which words were drawn, together with quotations to prove that a word was used by these authors and to illustrate its use. It was typically made up of texts written in the prestige variety of the language. Johnson was not 'the first to base his dictionary closely on actual examples of usage' (McDermott and Moon 2005: 153), but its corpus was more extensive, more precisely defined than any other before him and explored it more systematically. Osselton called Johnsons method inductive, because the material for his dictionary came from his corpus, but this may be slightly exaggerated: in fact, Johnson drew many of his headwords and his microstructural information from already-published dictionaries' (Lancashire 2005: 164), and he used his corpus as much to illustrate the words that he had decided to include as to find eligible words. The corpus was often used a posteriori, to confirm his intuitions and to give to his pronouncements the authority of the great authors of the texts that he used. 2.3.3.3 A Dictionary of the literary language Because he wanted his dictionary to record the best linguistic usage, Johnson based it on the literary texts of the best authors of the past. The compilers of the Tesoro in Spain in 1611 and of the Vocabolario in Italy in 1612 had shown the way in their descriptions of Spanish and Italian. Richelet

had done the same for his Dictionnaire franois (1680): the title page said that it was drawn from the usage of the best authors of the French language. Interestingly, the French Academy had decided otherwise for the first edition of its dictionary in 1694: Chapelains plan of 1636 had envisaged systematic recourse to great authors of the past But this purist and literary orientation was rejected by important elements at Court and in the cultivated classes, and the Academy abandoned the notion of including citations from literary texts the opposite course, it will be noted, to that taken later by Samuel Johnson. (Cowie 2002: 80) The Dictionnaire de lAcadmie aimed at describing the language of the present, the language of the courtiers and of the most distinguished people: it was synchronic and mundane, rather than passist and literary (Collinot and Mazire 1997: 24). The literary basis of Johnsons dictionary and of many dictionaries that followed led to a more generous use of quotations than before, in France and in England (Read 1986: 32). Literary quotations had been used in English lexicography as early as 1598 by Florio in his Worlde of Wordes (Landau 1984: 55), but Johnson had more of them than preceding lexicographers, and he used them more systematically, for every word and meaning. Oddly enough, in the early stages, in France, the practice was not approved by all: The inflation of quotations in monolingual; and bilingual Latin dictionaries in the sixteenth century was seen as a substitute for the reading of ancient texts, and argued against as such. (Collinot and Mazire 1997: 34). Literary quotations have remained a feature of all the larger dictionaries since then: A dictionary without examples is only a skeleton, Larousse said much later. They are still used for various reasons, to show that a word exists, to show that it is used by great authors, to show in what sort of context it is used, to introduce extra information, encyclopedic, pragmatic, cultural, to mention famous literary passages, to serve as vehicles for values and opinions, or to make the dictionary more attractive. For Littr, they were scraps of the purple (Leschiera 1990: 85). The use of literary quotations in a dictionary that has the common words of a language had consequences that some - including Samuel Johnson himself (Read 1986: 38) have found absurd:
The literary bias has marked lexicography since the eighteenth century ; so much so that it would seem sacrilegious in France for a large dictionary (and this is true of the G.L.L.F. [Grand Larousse de la Langue Franaise, 1978] as well as of the T.L.F. not to illustrate the most common use of the most frequent verb by a quotation from Victor Hugo, J.K. Huysmans, Paul Claudel or Andr Malraux. (Wagner 1975: 94)

The practice has continued: PR illustrates the adjective ferme by a quotation from Pierre MacOrlan, Prends encore ces tomates. Elles sont fermes et fraches; SOED has a quotation by Anthony Burgess to illustrate the adjective kind, Mother Andrea had a sweet face and was kind and gentle, and there are thousands of similar examples.

2.3.3.4 The normative function of the dictionary A few lexicographers before Johnson had indicated their approval or disapproval of words or expressions by using labels or various typographical symbols (Osselton 2006), but the idea that dictionaries could have a regulatory influence on language appeared only in the 18 th century. It was an issue in 1728, as this passage from Chjambers Preface for his Cyclopedia shows:
The Dictionarist, like an Historian, comes after the Affair, and gives a Description of what has passd. [He] is not supposed to have any hand in the Things he relates; he is no more concerned to make the Improvements, or establish the Significations, than the Historian to atchieve the Transactions he relates. (Preface XII)

In many European countries at the time, people thought that language was deteriorating, and that dictionaries could help arrest the evolution and protect the language from decay: One of the devices used by society to impose uniformity of meaning and usage in the dictionary (Hanks 1979: 38). The movement had started in Spain and Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where official regulatory bodies, the Academies, had been created. Their dictionaries were compiled at the request of the sovereigns to record the whole language and to establish a standard to be followed (Zgusta 1989a: 75). The same anxiousness to fix the language reached the intelligentsia in France and in Britain in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Sledd and Kolb 1955: 5). In France, it led to the creatin of the French Academy in 1635, which soon started work on its dictionary. In England, Locke had pleaded for the creation of an authority on language in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690, and some like Daniel Defoe or Jonathan Swift, wanted to emulate the French (Benson 2001: 84) Johnson was against the idea. It never materialized, but one consequence was the publication of a large number of grammar books which, together with dictionaries, could be expected to participate in the shifting of the good grain from the chaff (Read 1986: 32) and were extremely popular: The tremendous interest in grammar in the eighteenth century is exemplified by the publication of about fifty grammars in the first half of the century and more than 200 in the second half (Landau 2001: 244). Robert Lowths A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), for example, went through hundreds of editions. The dictionary that was needed to establish a standard was one that would enjoy enough prestige to impress its users, and that would be clearly prescriptive, indicating what was good and what was bad usage. Dryden pleaded for the compilation of such a dictionary in 1693 (Benson 2001: 84), and for some time, Addison planned to compile one (Sledd and Kolb 1955: 7); Pope also had drawn plans for a dictionary (Sledd and Kolb 1955: 7), but it was Samuel Johnson who was eventually entrusted with the task. A prescriptive dictionary is a dictionary that includes the good words in its wordlist and that omits the bad words, or expresses its disapproval of the bad words that it has not been able to omit; a descriptive dictionary records usage as it is, good or bad. The two types use different norms. Descriptive dictionaries use a quantitative norm based on the observation of the use of language in the community: any form is good as long as it is used by a sufficient number of users. The difficulty is to

determine the minimum number of users, or of uses, required for a linguistic form to be considered acceptable. The quantitative norm corresponds to the modern corpus. Prescriptive dictionaries use a qualitative norm based on the use of language by the best users. The difficulty here is the choice of the model. It is always written rather than spoken, and literary, and typically from some time before the compilation of the dictionary. The qualitative norm corresponds to the eighteenth-century type of corpus, giving priority to aesthetic judgment over frequency. No dictionary can be purely descriptive, because the lexicographer has to choose what to include. All dictionaries exclude some words, dialect words, obsolete words, childrens words, taboo words, etc. However liberal; in their macrostructure and microstructure, they always embody a model of linguistic usage through what they choose to record and to omit (Rey 1982: 30). That is why many metalexicographers prefer to say that dictionaries are normative, a label that does not have the negative connotations of the term prescriptive. The normative aspect of dictionaries is best seen in the indication of spelling. The dictionary, even if it gives the different spellings of a word, has to choose a form or use as an entry or sub-entry, and therefore shows a preference. Pure descriptivism is impossible. A dictionary can be purely prescriptive, but its prescriptions are hopeless if they are too far removed from the realities of usage, if they are pure Canutism. When Johnson started work on his Dictionary, he was anxious that the English language would change beyond recognition (Mitchell 2005: 208), and he wanted to play a part in the effort to save it from decay: Every language, he wrote in the beginning of his Preface, has improprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe. He wrote to Lord Chesterfield: This, my Lord, is my idea of an English dictionary; a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed, and it attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened.
[He was] imbued with prescriptivism, both in his choice of sources and in his judgment on the usages his sources illustrated. He censored usage in choosing his quoatation sources from a clearly defined and limited range of literary giants and of writers of established stature in selected other fields, for example, theological or philosophical, and he censured these writers usage even while recording it in his dictionary. (Brewer 2000: 41)

He was, Green (1996:3) writes with the hyperbole that has become usual when it comes to discussing Johnsons achievements, playing God. Or, if not God, then at least Moses, descending from Sinai with the tablets of the law. But Johnson later realized, like Chambers and Martin before him, that no one can prevent language from changing, and that the best the lexicographer can do is to record those changes. By 1755, he had abandoned his prescriptivist hopes:
Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, require that it should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have

indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify And with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation. (Preface)