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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 84
• It provides analyses and decisions about pronunciation, polysemy,
fixed collocations, etc. which are independent of the linguist’s ideas.
• Dictionaries can be excellent sources of historical data.
Possible disadvantages of this type of data include:
• Search engines for electronic dictionaries do not always make it easy to
carry out the search you need for your query.
• Examples of ‘usage’ are often invented, and may not give a true picture
of the language.
• Dictionaries provide limited syntagmatic information.
• The arrangement of the entries can mask information which is important
for the linguist.
• There is a relatively high concentration of rare, obscure or technical
words in some dictionaries.
• Criteria for decisions about inclusion of items, layout, spelling conventions,
entry-division, etc. may not be clear or consistent.
Sound recordings
The advent of sound recording had a profound effect on the data available for linguistic
study. This is most obvious in the fields of phonetics, conversation analysis,
the study of child language and the study of pathological language. However,
the importance of recorded data for the study of syntax should not be ignored.
We can distinguish here between two kinds of recorded data: recordings of
conversations, lectures, meetings, etc. which would have taken place whether
or not the sound recording had been made, and recordings which are deliberately
made to capture particular linguistic events. The latter includes the
reading of texts (sometimes larded with examples relevant to the linguist),
the utterance of individual words (whether these are read or prompted for by
the interviewer in some way), and the establishment of experimental situations
designed to elicit particular types of linguistic behaviour (perhaps the asking of
questions, for example).
Recordings of naturally occurring events
Possible benefits of this type of data include:
• This is presumably the most natural kind of data available, illustrating
language use with the least possible conscious control.
• Recording provides the only way to get accurate data on a number of
the phenomena in spoken language, including hesitation, pausing,