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83 THE DATA OF LINGUISTICS
• There is variability between sources as to style, etc., although this can
be exploited.
• The texts display an unknown amount of editorial interference and
standardisation.
• Newspaper sources are typically anonymous, which makes it hard to
use them for sociolinguistic enquiry.
Dictionaries and word-lists
Dictionaries look like a linguist’s heaven: they are full of words, each word is
provided with one or more meanings, some of them provide illustrations of the
use of the words (and thus of the syntactic patterns in which they occur), and
more and more they are available in electronic format, which makes them easier
to search.
However, care is required with dictionary data. First, all words are treated
the same, so that fiacre and fiancé have similar entries, despite the fact that one
is much more common that the other. Second, dictionaries given no direct
information on word frequency, and very little on the ways in which words are
used – their collocations and typical grammatical patterning. Sometimes dictionaries
aimed at non-native speakers are more useful than dictionaries for
native speakers in this regard. Third, dictionaries do not necessarily make it
simple to take a random sample of words, although they appear to do that. The
problem is that a word like combust may have an entry consisting of just a few
lines, while a word like come may have an entry which spills over several
columns or pages. While there are more words like combust, more room is given
to words like come, and any simple counting or sampling procedure (such as
consider the first new word on every fifth page) is likely to end up with a biased
sample. Fourth, dictionaries inevitably involve compromises between academic
integrity and commercial feasibility, and there is a certain random element in
what happens to be included in them. Having said that, The Oxford English
Dictionary, particularly in its on-line incarnation, is an invaluable tool for
anyone dealing with the history of English or the vocabulary of English.
It should be recalled that as well as ordinary monolingual and translating dictionaries,
there are dictionaries of special vocabularies, dialect dictionaries, dictionaries
of pronunciations, dictionaries of synonyms and antonyms, dictionaries
of etymology, dictionaries of Indo-European roots, and a host of other works
which provide fascinating reading and a wealth of valuable information.
Possible benefits of this type of data include:
• It provides easy access to large amounts of data.
• The existence of competing dictionaries provides simple checks on the
accuracy of the available data.