Crystal - Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics

THE LANGUAGE LIBRARY

Series editor: David Crystal

The Language Library was created in 1952 by Eric Partridge, the great etymologist and lexicographer, who from 1966 to 1976 was assisted by his co-editor Simeon Potter. Together they commissioned volumes on the traditional themes of language study, with particular emphasis on the history of the English language and on the individual linguistic styles of major English authors. In 1977 David Crystal took over as editor, and The Language Library now includes titles in many areas of linguistic enquiry.

The most recently published titles in the series include:

1980, 1985, 1991, 1997, 2003, 2008 by David Crystal

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Sixth edition published 2008 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

3 2011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crystal, David, 1941
A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics/David Crystal. - 6th ed.
p. cm.
Revised ed. of: A dictionary of linguistics & phonetics. 5th ed. 2003.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-5296-9 (hardcover: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-4051-5297-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Linguistics-Dictionaries. I. Crystal, David, 1941- Dictionary of linguistics & phonetics. II. Title.
P29.C65 2007 410.3dc22
200705226

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Preface to the Sixth Edition

When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity; and modes of expression to be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority.

Samuel Johnson, Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language

One sign of immaturity [in a science] is the endless flow of terminology. The critical reader begins to wonder if some strange naming taboo attaches to the terms that a linguist uses, whereby when he dies they must be buried with him.

Dwight Bolinger, Aspects of Language, p. 554

It is over twenty-five years since the first edition of this book, and the plaint with which I began the preface to that edition remains as valid as ever. What is needed, I said then, is a comprehensive lexicographical survey, on historical principles, of twentieth-century terminology in linguistics and phonetics. And I continued, in that and the subsequent four prefaces, in the following way.

We could use the techniques, well established, which have provided dictionaries of excellence, such as the Oxford English Dictionary. The painstaking scrutiny of texts from a range of contexts, the recording of new words and senses on slips, and the systematic correlation of these as a preliminary to representing patterns of usage: such steps are routine for major surveys of general vocabulary and could as readily be applied for a specialized vocabulary, such as the present undertaking. Needless to say, it would be a massive task and one which, for linguistics and phonetics, has frequently been initiated, though without much progress. I am aware of several attempts to work along these lines, in Canada, Great Britain, Japan and the United States, sometimes by individuals, sometimes by committees. All seem to have foundered, presumably for a mixture of organizational and financial reasons. I tried to initiate such a project myself, twice, but failed both times, for the same reasons. The need for a proper linguistics dictionary is thus as urgent now as it ever was; but to be fulfilled it requires a combination of academic expertise, time, physical resources and finance which so far have proved impossible to attain.

But how to cope, in the meantime, with the apparently endless flow of terminology which Bolinger, among many others, laments? And how to deal with the enquiries from the two kinds of consumer of linguistic and phonetic terms? For this surely is the peculiar difficulty which linguists have always had to face that their subject, despite its relative immaturity, carries immense popular as well as academic appeal. Not only, therefore, is terminology a problem for the academic linguist and phonetician; these days, such people are far outnumbered by those who, for private or professional reasons, have developed more than an incidental interest in the subject. It is of little use intimating that the interest of the outside world is premature, as has sometimes been suggested. The interest exists, in a genuine, responsible and critical form, and requires a comparably responsible academic reaction. The present dictionary is, in the first instance, an attempt to meet that popular demand for information about linguistic terms, pending the fuller, academic evaluation of the subjects terminology which one day may come.