Mariusz Piotr Kamiński. Defining with Simple Vocabulary in English Dictionaries.

Abstract

This book must be the most thorough and comprehensive up-to-date account of restricted vocabularies of the English language. In the Introduction, the author formulates six research questions, which partly aim at the design of different restricted vocabularies, and, partly focus on the effectiveness of definitions based on restricted vocabularies. Chapter 1 traces the development of restricted vocabularies back to the 17th century and outlines important stages such as Isaac Pitman's and Kaeding's shorthand systems. The author then makes a distinction between (a) the frequency-based objective approach taken by scholars such as Thorndike and Horn, (b) a more pedagogically oriented approach associated with Harold Palmer and Michael West, and (c) a logical approach attributed to Ogden and Richards, and discusses the pros and cons of each of them. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to a very detailed outline and critical discussion of Michael West's famous and influential General Service List. He comes back to the GSL after outlining a number of word list projects that were designed for pedagogical purposes in Chapter 2, which also deals with human-computer communication projects and Wierzbicka's theory of a semantic metalanguage.