International Journal of Lexicography, 2019, Vol. 32, No.

3, 362–388
doi: 10.1093/ijl/ecz003
Advance Access Publication Date: 4 February 2019
Article

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Article

TOWARDS A DISCOURSE APPROACH TO

CRITICAL LEXICOGRAPHY
Wenge Chen
College of Foreign Languages, Huaqiao University (wengerchen@163.com); School of
International Languages, Xiamen University of Technology (chenwenge@xmut.edu.cn)

Abstract
Ideology and power, the vital concerns of critical lexicography, are aspects of a dic-
tionary that a lexicographer and a discerning dictionary user have to encounter in
any serious lexicographical enterprise (Kachru 1995); however, critical lexicography
as a theme did not receive much attention until Kachru and Kahane (1995). This term
later appeared in Hornscheidt (2011) and Moon (2014). However, to date there has
not been any systematic theoretical exemplification of what critical lexicography is
and how critical lexicographical research is done. Additionally, the scope and func-
tion of critical lexicography is relatively limited when we consider the global context,
since it fails to take into account theoretical and methodological inspirations from
other disciplines such as Critical Discourse Studies and/or Postcolonial Studies,
which would make it more theoretically robust and analytically explanatory. With
this gap in mind, this paper proposes a discourse approach to Critical Lexicography,
termed Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies (CLDS), as a response to the call
for lexicographers’ ‘social accountability’. Specifically, the article puts forward a def-
inition of CLDS and its key concepts, denotes its ontological, epistemological and
methodological orientations, delineates its principles, proposes a tentative analytic
framework and demonstrates a simplified case study. The article argues that a dis-
course approach to critical lexicography opens up space to understand different
meaning-making practices and contestation in lexicography. In doing so, this article
contributes to the development of international (English) lexicography and the lan-
guage(s) it represents.

Key words: critical lexicography, dictionary, discourse, power, ideology

1. Introduction: The ‘Why’ of a discourse approach to critical

lexicography
Lexicography and its products, dictionaries, are never value-free, apolitical or asocial.
Instead, they are subject to ideology, power and politics. In 2016, The Oxford Dictionary
of English was accused of being sexist for its use of ‘a rabid feminist’ as example phrase for

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Towards a Discourse Approach to Critical Lexicography 363

‘rabid’. At first, the publisher responded ‘flippantly’ to the criticism, saying that ‘Our ex-
ample sentences come from real-world use’, but it later apologized and agreed to review
this example and others1. As far back as 1924, the Jewish Chronicle objected to the publica-
tion of unlabelled senses for the word ‘Jew’ in Oxford University Press (OUP) dictionaries:

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‘unscrupulous usurer or bargainer’ and ‘to cheat, overreach’. OUP dictionary publisher R.
W. Chapman is said to have replied that ‘it is no part of the duty of a lexicographer to pass
judgement on the justice or the propriety of current usage’ and that ‘the real question is not
whether a phrase is rude, but whether it is current’ (Benson 2002: 50). However, OUP final-
ly yielded to the request that these senses should be labelled as derogatory and in modern
dictionaries definitions of this kind are normally accompanied by warning labels indicating
that the usage is offensive or potentially offensive (Benson 2002). In 2008, the publication
in South Korea of The Chinese-Korean Dictionary compiled by a Korean university, which
claimed it to be the most comprehensive Chinese dictionary, brought not a sense of glory to
many Chinese but anguish, shame, and indignity over the potential loss of discursive power
in the field of Chinese lexicography. These lexicographical incidents point to the fact that
lexicography does not take place in a vacuum. Lexicography is never a disembodied activ-
ity. As Chen and Zhao (2014) have argued, modern lexicography must become more critic-
al. A further reason in support of this position relates to the fact that the courts have come
to use the dictionary meanings of words in their decisions, for the dictionary offers ‘an au-
thority seen as objective and general’ (Hutton 2009: 101). However, from a critical perspec-
tive, this assumption needs to be questioned, especially since we are witnessing increasing
cases of legal and political disputes concerning the definition of certain words and terms
like ‘unborn’. Obviously, there is an ideological interest vested in dictionary definitions.
Ideology and power, the vital concerns of critical lexicography, are aspects of a diction-
ary that a lexicographer and a discerning dictionary user have to encounter in any serious
lexicographical enterprise (Kachru 1995: Introduction). For example, when Samuel
Johnson stated in his Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language that ‘barbarous or im-
pure words and expressions, may be branded with some note of infamy, as they are careful-
ly to be eradicated wherever they are found’ (Johnson 1747:29), he already had his
prescriptivist ideology manifested. Studies on the ideological practices in dictionary making
have extensively covered issues such as gender (Gershuny 1974; Whitcut 1984; Hennessy
1994; Cowie 1995; Hoey 1996; Moon 2014), racism and religion (Burchfield 1991;
Willinsky 1994; Benson 2002; Hornscheidt 2008; Ogilvie 2013), politics and class (Moon
1989; Desmet et al. 1990; Ezquerra 1995; Farina 1995; Kim 1995; Wierzbicka 1995;
Seokju 2001; Baider 2006). However, critical lexicography as a theme has not truly been
granted the full attention of scholars. Kachru and Kahane (1995) is perhaps the first publi-
cation to do so. Though the term has appeared in passing in Hornscheidt (2011) and Moon
(2014), to date there has not been any systematic theoretical clarification of what critical
lexicography is (or should be) and how critical lexicographical research is done. In general,
existing studies on lexicographical ideology have fallen short in two major aspects. First,
they tend to stop at describing the linguistic manifestations of ideology in the lexicographic-
al text, without going further to interpret the relationship between the lexicographical text
and the social processes of the interaction, let alone to explain the relationship between the
social processes and the social context. That is, an analysis of the relationship between lex-
icographical texts, processes, and their social conditions (both the immediate situational
context and the broader institutional and social conditions) is in general missing from
364 Wenge Chen

research on lexicographical ideology. Second, they tend to focus on monolingual diction-

aries in the once colonizer nations such as the United Kingdom and Demark, giving little at-
tention to those in the once colonized nations. The cross-cultural and social power and
resistance between them is largely neglected. Such inadequacy is increasingly prominent in

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the global context. Kachru’s (1995: 422) alert in the afterword of Cultures, Ideologies and
the Dictionary still applies to the present day:

This age-old pastime (lexicography) is gradually becoming essentially an enterprise of the multi-
national publishing industry, with immense technological power to support it. One wonders,
what are the implications of this overwhelming technological resource, particularly when con-
trolled by multinational publishing houses? One might ask: In what ways will this increasing
concentration of resources further widen the North vs. South divide? What will be its ideological
and cultural implications?

Benson (2002) raises the same question of why, in the post-imperial age, a dictionary designed
for the age of imperialism (Oxford English Dictionary) should remain not only the model,
but also the leading site, for the lexicography of English as an international language, and calls
for attention to the discursive construction of the English language as an object.
A discourse approach to critical lexicography, which is emancipatory in nature, is rather
necessary in the context of post-colonial (English) lexicography. While many people in post-
colonial Peripheral English communities like New Zealand or countries like Australia and
Canada are pleased to see the emergence of post-colonial dictionaries of regional Englishes
and may feel relieved that their regional English has gained acceptance and freed themselves
from their colonial pasts and therefore find it a victory in constructing their own English
dictionaries, they still feel their English is under threat from perceived prestige forms of
English (especially British English), or from a culturally dominant form of English
(American English). Regional English dictionaries continue to be denigrated because they
are judged to be inferior in terms of an external prestige model. The denigration may come
from many levels, ranging from the speakers of Centre English to the lexicographers from
the Centre. For example, in a review of Macquarie Dictionary, an Australian regional
English dictionary, Robert Burchfield, the editor of A Supplement to The Oxford English
Dictionary documented a catalogue of its lexicographical infelicities and referred to ‘its oc-
casional charming unawareness of the standard professional requirements of reputable lexi-
cography outside Australia’ (Burchfield 1982, quoted in Benson 2002). Up to now, English
lexicography is Anglo/America-centred, and the practice is culturally imperialistic. Yet, the
paradigmatic discussions so far still revolve around the view of the dictionary as a material
product, with little attention given to the importance of discourse in constructing authority
and emancipation in relation to lexicography. In the context of postcolonial lexicography
and World Englishes when (English) dictionaries are considered to constitute (linguistic) in-
dependence (Huddart 2014), and when lexicographers are called upon to address the
culture-specific dimension of knowledge sharing in today’s global village and broaden their
cultural viewpoint’ (Kermas 2012: 75), research into the dictionary’s role in reproducing
and transforming global/social inequality is still scarce. A discourse approach to critical
lexicography is thus needed to unmask the power relations behind, and the ways in which
language serves to sustain or disrupt the relation in the global context, before a change in
the status quo is possible, as such an approach — with emphasis on social context — ena-
bles a practitioner to look at the lexicographical event as a social event and the dictionary
as discourse with its own rules and principles.
Towards a Discourse Approach to Critical Lexicography 365

A discourse approach to critical lexicography may also contribute to the growing re-
search in meta-lexicography, which, some might suggest, falls within the field of Applied
Linguistics, and one demerit of which is that it tends to operate in a decontextualized con-
text. As Cameron (2005) points out, the general tenet of linguistics and sociolinguistics that

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it is involved in description rather than prescription is problematic since ‘both prescriptiv-
ism and anti-prescriptivism invoke certain norms and circulate particular notions about
how language ought to work’ (Cameron 2005: 8). To claim that linguistic or sociolinguistic
descriptions of language are objective or value-neutral goes against any more complex
understanding of the politics of knowledge and would lead to a problematic emphasis on
‘appropriacy’ (Fairclough 1995: 218). By contrast, a critical view of language would em-
phasize the fact that prestigious social groups have established these conventions: they are
not ‘natural’ or necessarily the way they are (Pennycook 2001). Fairclough (1992a) pro-
poses critical language awareness, arguing that models of language variation based upon
the concept of appropriateness project a misleading and unsustainable image of sociolin-
guistic practice and how sociolinguistic orders are structured. He goes on to suggest that the
appropriateness version of language variation, with its presuppositions that the distinction
between appropriate and inappropriate is clear-cut, that such appropriacy is the same for
all members of a community, and that there is a clear match between language variants and
contexts of use, simply does not hold up under critical scrutiny, and that the notion of
appropriacy needs to be understood ideologically (Fairclough 1992a: 48). This critical view
of language has been much emphasized in critical pedagogy, critical applied linguistics and
feminist pedagogy to empower the learners, but less so in lexicography.
A critical dimension of lexicography involves constant scepticism and questioning of the
normative assumptions, would help improve critical language awareness, whose aim is to
empower learners as well as professionals (lexicographers in the present case) by providing
them with a critical analytical framework. It would also help them reflect on their own lan-
guage experiences and practices and on the language practices of others in the institutions
to which they belong, and in the wider society within which they live (Clark and Ivani
c
1997), as well as to engage in the struggle to contest and change such practices. Such a crit-
ical turn requires scholars to engage with what is going on ‘beyond the text’, i.e., to relate
the text to specific social contexts.
Furthermore, an important rationale for a discourse approach to critical lexicography is
to further develop the existing theories of dictionary criticism. Traditional practices of dic-
tionary criticism tend to be asocial. Traditional dictionary critics are committed to the iden-
tification of what is bad or good about a dictionary from a user perspective, but without
taking into account the social context and power relations surrounding the production of a
dictionary. They tend to see the dictionary as a product rather than a process. A criticism of
a dictionary without considering the relevant social context arguably will not be fair or ob-
jective enough (Chen 2015) as it fails to understand the contingent relationships between
the dictionary as discourse and the society and other discourses.

2. The possibility of CLDS: The critical paradigmatic shifts of

lexicography paving the way for CLDS
Though the view of the dictionary as a reference tool has been dominant for thousands of
years, various alternative views of the dictionary have emerged to challenge this dominant
366 Wenge Chen

view. These alternative views, with their strengths and weaknesses, have contributed to the
development of a discourse approach to critical lexicography (termed here Critical
Lexicographical Discourse Studies and hereinafter CLDS).

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2.1 Dictionary as text
Frawley (1989) formulates the dictionary as text from seven criteria of textuality, i.e. cohe-
sion, coherence, acceptability, informativity, intentionality, situationality and intertextual-
ity. He argues that the dictionary as text can be approached from four positions, that is,
from the position of text as an autonomous object, from the position of the writer or the
producer, from the position of the reader or the receiver and from the totality of the three
positions. The four positions call attention to both the inner text structure of the dictionary
and the external forces of the production of a dictionary.
Informed by Frawley, Yong and Peng (2007) observe that the dictionary bears striking
resemblance to text from a structural point of view: on a megastructural level, a dictionary
begins with the front matter, which serves as an introduction. This is then followed by the
body part of the dictionary (i.e. dictionary text), which tells the main story (typically, mean-
ings and usage of words). What comes after the body text is the back matter, which con-
cludes the dictionary with supplementary material to the main story. The view of the
dictionary as text provides an important foundation for CLDS because it is at the textual
level that ideology in a (lexicographical) discourse is triggered.
However, Frawley’s conceptualization of the dictionary as text focuses mainly on the in-
formation structure of the lexicographical text and neglects the external social factors.

2.2 Dictionary as communication

Inspired by modern communication theory and systemic functional linguistics, Yong and
Peng (2007) propose seeing the dictionary as communication, in that dictionary making is
in essence a process of information dissemination and sharing. In their model, the dictionary
compiler and dictionary user communicate in the context of the dictionary. Context is rep-
resented by ‘dictionary’ and is realized through selecting various options under ‘field’ (e.g.
lexicographical message), ‘mode’ (e.g. ways of presenting lexicographical message) and
‘tenor’ (e.g. interpersonal relations between the dictionary compiler and the user).
Dictionary-making is realized by making a series of choices of field, mode and tenor, and
putting them into operation. Yong and Peng’s dynamic communicative model of lexicog-
raphy rectifies the traditional lexicographer’s neglect of the dictionary as a social cultural
act. It offers an inspirational insight to CLDS as it innovatively integrates text and context,
and the relationship between text and context is the vital concern of CLDS, which seeks to
relate the socio-linguistic features of a lexicographic text to status, control and power rela-
tions between participants in a dictionary. Its weakness is that it shies away from power
structures and ideological struggle in the lexicographical process.

2.3 Dictionary as intertext

Frawley (1985) draws inspiration from post-structural, deconstructionist literary criticism
for a theory of text and accounts for lexicography as a form of writing, like history: just as
there is only historicizing, the activity of writing historical texts, there is only lexicographiz-
ing, the activity of writing lexicographical texts (Frawley 1985).
Towards a Discourse Approach to Critical Lexicography 367

Hence, lexicography, like history, does not exist proper, but exists simply as there are
dictionaries written. This view of the dictionary as writing accounts for two things: diction-
aries are selective, deconstructive and incomplete, and that any attempts to strip the diction-
ary of ideology and bias are themselves ideological acts. According to Frawley (1985), the

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dictionary emerges in a culture as a text that mediates the opacity in the written representa-
tion system to allow its user access to new signifiers and hence access to other texts. In other
words, dictionaries are texts for other texts.
From the deconstructionist point of view, the dictionary as text is endless and self-
deconstructing; it deconstructs itself in active production and reception. In Frawley’s words,
a dictionary is self-deconstructing because while a written definition includes a meaning of
a word, it also excludes another. The dictionary as a text is made by the reading of it, so it
is subject to plurality. The user reads signifiers explicating other signifiers instead of locat-
ing the semantic answer.
By exploring the intertextual nature of the dictionary, Frawley dismisses the idea of see-
ing the dictionary as fixed answers or something that has a beginning or an end. The view
of the dictionary as intertext and as writing is deconstructive, a view which is important for
CLDS as it allows us to explain the plurality in defining words and the emergence of differ-
ent dictionaries with different ideological interests.

2.4 Dictionary as discourse

Benson (2002) proposes the dictionary as discourse, using ideas from Foucault (1979) that
social practice is conditioned by historically specific rules for the production and distribu-
tion of knowledge. He seeks to reveal the ethnocentric representation in the English diction-
aries published in Britain/USA and to show how knowledge in the English dictionaries is
filtered through Anglo-American perspectives on English in the world (Benson 2002,
Preface). Benson argues that the structures of monolingual (English in his study) dictionaries
represent a particular way of producing and distributing knowledge of language that is
bound up with broader issues of social power and control, and that the dictionary as dis-
course on language cannot be considered independently of other discourses that contribute
to our knowledge of the world, and the social practices contingent upon it. He showcases
that the Oxford English Dictionary was more or less explicitly a project of British imperial-
ism concerned with the consolidation of English as the dominant language of the world.
Hornscheidt (2008) sees dictionaries as discourse formation in their own right. Focusing
on colonialism and racism in Danish monolingual dictionaries, he seeks to answer how
ideological factors can be localized in dictionaries and what consequences they bring about.
Hornscheidt’s study, though claiming the use of Critical Discourse Studies (hereinafter
CDS) as the framework, does not follow the CDS methodological approach. For example,
he doesn’t explain how the construction of meaning came about in the Danish dictionary. I
conceptualize lexicography as recontextualization and examine how the dictionary as dis-
course covaries with society (Chen 2015), how the lexicographers construct the
lexicographer-user relations (Chen 2017a), how power and resistance play out in the recon-
textualization of lexicographic discourse across languages and cultures to result in the trans-
formation of meaning (Chen 2017b), and how discursive and language resources are
appropriated by bilingual lexicographers to establish solidarity with the powerful linguistic
community and to create affiliation with members of their community (Chen 2018).
Though I (Chen 2015, 2017a, 2017b, 2018) have exemplified how critical discourse studies
368 Wenge Chen

of the dictionary could be done, owing to constraints of space and research focus, I have
not yet put forward a systematic explanation of what CLDS is. However, these several case
studies on the dictionary as discourse (Chen 2015, 2017a, 2017b, 2018) will be drawn on
here as examples of CLDS.

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3. The ‘What’ of a discourse approach to critical lexicography
3.1 Key concepts of Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies
Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies is devoted to the informed critiques of lexicog-
raphy, which is grounded in a synergy perspective from Critical (social) Theory, Critical
Discourse Studies and Postcolonial Studies. The key tenet of CLDS is to expose and seek
remedies against social/cultural inequalities and injustices. It rests on the assumption that
lexicography is a recontextualizing practice and that the dictionary, as a recontextualized
discourse, is closely associated with other social/discursive practices and a site where ideo-
logical and social struggles take place. As a recontextualized discourse, the dictionary does
not simply replicate its source or just ‘transport’ meaning; rather, it creates meaning; it
rewrites and represents things in new ways (Chen 2015). CLDS highlights sociolinguistic/
sociopolitical agency in the transformation of one discourse/text to another (or even in the
transfer of one word from one context to another). By relocating meaning in a new context,
the dictionary as a recontextualized discourse not only erodes the polyvalence of the source
but may also serve to deliberately maintain or disrupt existing power relations as the recon-
textualization follows social rules but not logical facts (See Bernstein 2003: 184). The fol-
lowing definitions of the key concepts of Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies provide
insights into its nature.

Critical
Critique is ‘essentially making visible the interconnectedness of things’ (Fairclough 1995: 36).
‘Critical’ does not mean ‘negative’ as in common-sense usage. Instead of being taken for
granted, any social phenomenon subjects itself to critical investigation and challenge. Critique
is ‘a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchal-
lenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest’ (Foucault 1998:
155). It ‘is the mechanism for both explaining social phenomena and for changing them’
(Fairclough et al. 2011: 358). To be critical means to link ‘social and political engagement’
with ‘a sociologically informed construction of society’ (Titscher and Jenner 2000: 88). A re-
searcher in critical lexicographical discourse analysis should embed the lexicographical data
in the social context, taking a political stance explicitly and focus on self-reflection as a
scholar. Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies seeks to produce and convey critical
knowledge that enables both lexicographers and dictionary users as well as to ‘emancipate
themselves from forms of domination through self-reflection’ (Wodak and Meyer 2015). It
seeks to root out a particular kind of delusion about lexicography. Critical Lexicographical
Discourse Studies is oriented to critiquing and improving society (e.g. contributing to social
equality) by looking into and revealing the hidden power relations in lexicographical practice.

Power
Analysing and critiquing the relationship of discourse and power is a central task for CLDS
researchers. CLDS follows Wodak and Meyer’s perception of power as being about
Towards a Discourse Approach to Critical Lexicography 369

relations of difference, and particularly about the effect of difference in social structures
(Wodak and Meyer 2015: 34). Power ‘comes from the privileged access to social resources
such as education, knowledge and wealth’, which eventually enables dominant groups to
exert ‘domination, coercion and control of subordinate groups’ (Simpson and Mayr 2010:

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2). Embedded in the dictionary are both discoursal and institutional power. Fairclough
(2015: 27) goes on to distinguish between power in discourse and power behind discourse.
Power in discourse refers to the exercise of power in ‘unequal encounters’, where one par-
ticipant controls the contribution of others as in job interviews. Fairclough also refers to
hidden power in situations where people who are unequal in power are not co-present. For
example, there is inequality of power between the lexicographers and the dictionary users
(Chen 2017a).
Power behind discourse, also hidden power, refers to the power to shape and constitute
orders of discourse, or what discourses and genres are available as examples to those who
have access to them. In lexicography, power behind discourse may refer to those cases
where those powerful groups within the (English) lexicography use their power to establish
norms and to impose changes which eventually transform the order of discourse. That the
dictionary is a tool of language standardization and that the dictionary differentiates be-
tween standard and non-standard varieties are good cases in point for power behind dis-
course. People with economic power shape opinions, attitudes and actions in social life,
including lexicographical practices. Who (the national government or an international pub-
lisher, a national or a local publisher) funds a regional (English) dictionary2 may result in
different lexicographical texts and will be revealing of the role of power in lexicography.
Power in (English) lexicography to some extent corresponds to hegemony in lexicography,
which can be reflected in Benson’s worry that ‘many English-using regions lack both the fi-
nancial and academic resources and a sufficient local market to support a general dictionary
of English compiled from their own perspective’ (Benson 2002:111).
Power shapes lexicographic knowledge in more or less explicit ways. These include sit-
uations in which political interest openly censors or alters dictionaries, as in the former
Soviet Union when the reigning political ideology affected every dictionary published (Jones
2001). In a less explicit but still highly muscular fashion, dictionaries give social meanings
to a certain dialect/usage, highlighting the ‘standard’ variety, emphasizing elite discourse
and cancelling undesirable language use or social facts. Even the supposedly objective and
neutral historical Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a locus of power/knowledge produc-
tion: the rule of ethnocentricity has brought the lexicographers of the OED to use Britain as
the centre of the dictionary (cf. Benson 2002). However, power is not in itself bad
(Fairclough 2015: 27), and where there is power, there is resistance. Take English lexicog-
raphy as an example. Although Anglo-American lexicography has been dominant, lexicog-
raphy as a science has been conducive to the formation of nations. As Seargeant (2011: 6)
points out, ‘it is only when a world variety of English is supported by codification chiefly
through national dictionaries that one can make a strong claim that such a variety is
institutionalized’. One notable improvement in this regard is seen in post-colonial New
Zealand and Australian lexicography, where the impulse to mirror the natural and social
environment of the regions has been particularly strong (Deverson 2001: 29). Regional
English lexicography, by creating a new way of thinking about the language and the world,
has led to the collapse of the lexicographical wall. Dictionaries of other ‘regional’ English
varieties, the most representative of them being the Australian National Dictionary, have
370 Wenge Chen

emerged to disrupt the existing lexicographical order, and have produced a new perspective
on the language of English, offering an example of recursive relationship between power,
lexicography, and knowledge. This resistance by regional Englishes should not be viewed as
counter-productive; rather, resistance is a positive force that can stimulate power to re-

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organize, adapt and multiply (Knights and Vurdubakis 1994). Resistance in the bilingual-
ized dictionary in peripheral countries is conducive to dialogues between Central
and Peripheral English lexicography, thus contributing to the development of English and
English lexicography (Chen 2017b). By initiating such a ‘dialogical struggle’ (Hardy and
Phillips 2004: 304), Peripheral English lexicographers may develop their own lexicographic-
al discourse (Chen 2017b). However, it is worth noting that regional dictionaries are just as
liable to reproduce injustices and inequalities at the regional levels as Centre dictionaries
are at their level.

Text
Halliday and Hasan (1976: 1) emphasize that ‘a text may be spoken or written, prose or
verse, dialogue or monologue. It may be anything from a single proverb to a whole play,
from a momentary cry for help to an all-day discussion on a committee’. Therefore, the
length of text is no decisive factor in deciding a stretch of language as text. ‘Any passage,
spoken or written, of any length, that does form a unified whole’ is text (Halliday and
Hasan 1976: 1). Therefore, the whole dictionary, with its stable structure, can be seen as
text or supertext to be distinguished from other smaller units in a dictionary. Dictionary
texts are unlike ‘mainstream texts’ whose adjacent components normally form continuous
prose. They are, in Hoey’s term, colony texts3 (Hoey 1986; Hoey 1996), whose adjacent
components, the entries, do not enjoy clear semantic relationships. However, while there
are normally no relations such as cause-consequence or contrast holding between adjacent
components of a colony, there may be strong relations holding between non-adjacent com-
ponents (Hoey 1986). Hoey (1996) and I (Chen 2015) show that colony texts such as a dic-
tionary can be equally revealing of ideology. In Chen (2015), I also acknowledge
Fairclough’s (2003) highlight of context in the definition of texts as linguistic/semiotic ele-
ments of social events.

Ideology
Texts project meaning; therefore, they evoke ideologies (Tabbert 2015). Ideology is a cen-
tral concept in CLDS, but its definition is rather elusive. Wodak and Meyer define ideology
as a collectively shared ‘coherent and relatively stable set of beliefs or values’ (Wodak and
Meyer 2015: 30) while van Dijk (1988) conceptualizes ideologies as the ‘worldviews’ that
constitute ‘social cognition’, as ‘schematically organized complexes of representations and
attitudes with regard to certain aspects of the social world’ (van Dijk 2003: 258). That is,
socially, ideologies sustain the interests of groups; cognitively, they serve to organize the so-
cial representations (attitudes, knowledge) of the group, and thus indirectly monitor the
group-related social practices, and hence also the text and talk of its members.
Ideology is transmitted, enacted and reproduced primarily through language (Teo
2000), which is itself not neutral, but ‘a highly constructed mediator’ (Simpson 1993: 7).
To uncover ideology in the dictionary, we examine the language it uses.
To cover the broad research scope of lexicographical ideology, CLDS adopts Fowler and
Hodge’s (1979: 6) definition of ideology as ‘a systematic body of ideas, organized from a
Towards a Discourse Approach to Critical Lexicography 371

particular point of view’, as this definition is relatively broadly inclusive. Dictionaries, both
as representation of languages and of society and the world, are carriers of ideologies.
Lexicographers and their products are part of the ideological reproduction system.
Ideologies help structure (lexicographical) action, and therefore inform the discursive pro-

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duction and content of lexicographical texts and the associated behaviours of lexicogra-
phers. This links ideologies to discourses.

Discourse
The term discourse can be defined as ‘an institutionalized way of talking that regulates and
reinforces action and thereby exerts power’ (J€ ager and Maier 2001: 192). Discourse exer-
cises power in society by institutionalizing and regulating ways of talking, thinking and act-
ing. Discourse in CLDS follows the Foucauldian approach: lexicographical discourse is
bound up with knowledge and power. Each discourse is defined by a set of rules or princi-
ples, which are produced within social practice so that issues of knowledge are intimately
tied up with issues of power and control. To describe a discourse involves asking questions
such as ‘what rules permit certain statements to be made; what rules order these statements;
what rules permit us to identify some statements as true and others as false; what rules gov-
ern the construction of a map, model or classificatory system?’ (Philp 1985: 69). In the case
of lexicography, we need to ask what rules govern the construction of the
(English) dictionary.
To understand how the dictionary as discourse operates, Berti’s (2017) comparison of
discourse to a map, to organizing and to a mask is rather helpful. First, dictionaries as dis-
courses on languages, like maps, are representational practices that instead of reproducing
reality are selecting differences that matter. Just as ‘the map is not the territory’ (Korzybski
1958: 247), the dictionary is not the language at all. ‘Maps are not a faithful representation
of a territory, but an edited record of impressions based on other representations (e.g. sets
of geographical coordinates and other selected information on the examined territory),
which in turn represent but one particular way of making sense of a perceived space. They
play a central role in the social production of space (Berti 2017: 75). Likewise, the diction-
ary cannot faithfully represent the language reality. What can be included in a dictionary is
subject to the lexicographer’s particular way of seeing the word in relation to the social con-
text he/she is in. They form what Frawley (1985) calls a lexicographical space. In the com-
puterized age, lexicographers now tend to rely less on their intuition and more on corpus
evidence. However, no corpus is value-neutral (Hoey 1996). The corpus chosen for a dic-
tionary tended to prioritize written and published texts of those male writers.
Consequently, what the corpus reflects—not exclusively but nevertheless strongly—is the
value-system, as enshrined in their language, of the male-oriented establishment. The corpus
is in large part a collection of instances of language being used as an instrument of power
and control (Hoey 1996). In describing the usage of words based on such a corpus, lexicog-
raphers have to compromise with that ideology.
Second, lexicographical discourses, like maps, create a shared Grand Illusion that allows
us to give coherent meanings to an ever-transforming and infinitely textured world (cf. Berti
2017): by doing so they emphasize or hide features of the language/society. Like a map that
cannot include every region, every geographical feature of the terrain, a dictionary repre-
sents and highlights (thus legitimatizing) or ignoring (thus negating) the existence of a dia-
lect/language, and a word’s usage. On other occasions, lexicographers explicitly choose to
372 Wenge Chen

ignore certain dimensions completely to serve the purpose of the dictionary: for example, a
bilingual dictionary may alter the sense order of the equivalents in the target language of
the words in the source language. By examining what is included or excluded in a lexico-
graphical discourse, we can infer its implicit assumptions and ideologies.

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Third, while cartographers create a ‘spatial panopticon’ (Harley 1988: 3) where the map
serves as the window through which the objective reality of the terrain is made visible as an
object of social knowledge and is used to normalize and discipline subjects, influencing their
perception of the world, the lexicographers of the dictionary (the Oxford English
Dictionary) create a ‘lexical panopticon’ within which the historical depth and geographical
breadth of the language and the world as it had been made known through the language
can be exposed (cf. Benson 2002). For example, Encarta World English Dictionary
(Rooney and Soukhanov 1999) defines ‘durian’ as ‘a tree found in the tropical rain forests
of Southeast Asia that has foul-smelling but deliciously flavoured fruits’. The word ‘found’
indicates that it is the Anglo-American perspective but not an Asian one. The use of evalu-
ative words ‘foul-smelling but deliciously flavoured’ exoticizes the durian and represents
the construction of knowledge of the periphery countries. Obviously, the lexicographical
reality is socially constructed and is confined to the ‘panopticon’ the dictionary creates.
CLDS follows Fairclough’s (1992b: 4) definition of discourse: discourse is a three-tiered
concept consisting of ‘a piece of text, an instance of discursive practice and an instance of
social practice’. The definition gives credit to the structural and the social aspects of lan-
guage use, which are mutually inclusive. As for the relationship between text and discourse,
Bartlett (2012: 9) states that ‘placing text within its historical and social context is what
makes it discourse’. Therefore, text can be viewed as the concretization of discourse. The re-
lationship between language, text, ideology and discourse can be set as follows: discourse is
the carrier of ideology, which is in turn triggered at the level of language or textual level
(Tabbert 2015: 30).

3.2 What in the dictionary is subject to critique in CLDS?

After defining the key concepts of CLDS, we need to be aware of what is in the dictionary
that becomes the target of critique in CLDS. The answer is evident if we look at the three
fundamental assumptions about language that dictionary-making is generally based on. The
three assumptions, according to Seargeant (2011), are: 1) languages consist of words, which
are meaningful; 2) words have basic fixed meanings; and 3) words are part of a ‘language’.
The three assumptions are the good starting point of a CLDS. First, the dictionary’s priori-
tizing written language over spoken language is ideological in nature, for to bias ‘langue’
against ‘parole’ is a ‘rhetoric of standardization’ which serves the ‘transmutation of stand-
ard languages into mythical national languages’ (Fairclough 1989: 22). Dictionaries there-
fore serve as a tool of codification for such standardization. Second, as sociolinguistics and
linguistic theorists have long demonstrated, meanings are context-dependent. The sign is
impure, and the signifier is multi-valued and multi-accentual. As Volosinov put it: ‘The
meaning of a word is determined entirely by its context. In fact, there are as many meanings
of a word as there are contexts of its usage’ (Volosinov 1973: 21). The fixing of meaning in
a dictionary is the result of an ideological reduction of ‘muti-accentuality’ and therefore is a
matter of power. It is of limited value to think of a language as having a vocabulary that
can be documented in a dictionary, because there are a great many overlapping and compet-
ing vocabularies corresponding to different domains, institutions, practices, values and
Towards a Discourse Approach to Critical Lexicography 373

perspectives (Fairclough 1992b: 76). Therefore, practices such as the dictionary’s privileging
of context-independent referential meaning over connotational and collocational meanings,
its suppression of the multiplicity of the sign of a language and its prioritizing of the lan-
guage of print and literature are ideological and largely a matter of power. In other words,

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it is power that decides which words are to be included in a dictionary, how those words
should be defined and which meaning of a word is central. Power restricts the plenitude of
potential meanings of a word. Therefore, to do CLDS, we may examine what words are
included/excluded and how words are defined and commented on, among others, to infer
the ideological features of the dictionary and relate them to the context of production.

4. The ‘How’ of a discourse approach to critical lexicography:

Principles, methods, a framework
4.1 Fundamental principles of critical lexicographical discourse studies
Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies is understood as a critical orientation, an en-
deavour to challenge the received wisdom and knowledge in dictionary making. It seeks to
expose the ways in which discourse constitutes and reconstitutes social arrangement in a
lexicographical setting. It emphasizes how discourse is used to produce, maintain or resist
power, control and inequality through ideology and hegemony (Mumby and Clair 1997).
CLDS sees lexicography as sites of struggle in which different groups compete to shape the
social reality in ways that serve their own interests and in ways that enable them to exercise
or resist social control and any lexicographical text (the dictionary proper) is a social act, a
product of the socio-political and historical context in which it exists.
Ontologically, CLDS sees the objectivity and authority of the dictionary as a discursive
construct, a social fact rather than a natural fact. It tends to reject universalism, essential-
ism, and exceptionalism in defining meaning, and — instead — aims to prioritize specificity,
context, and history. However, it does not follow that CLDS denies that there is meaning
shared by people. Rather, it is suggested that the dictionary does not start out ‘possessing’
meaning, and that there is a discursive, political, and cultural process by which meaning has
come to be ‘fixed’, an idea that is obscured in the dictionary as a product. Meanings are cre-
ated and contested through negotiation, and are liable to change.
Epistemologically, CLDS sees knowledge as a social process and highlights the subjectiv-
ity of the lexicographers and meta-lexicographers, and the links between knowledge and
power. In other words, a critical approach to lexicographical studies starts with the accept-
ance that wholly objective or neutral knowledge — ‘truth’ — about the language and the
world is impossible and there is always an ideological, ethical-political dimension to the lex-
icographical process. This does not mean that all knowledge about the language and the
world is hopelessly insecure; instead, it is suggested that besides a commitment to the high-
est standards of scholarship in lexicography, lexicographic research and practice should
also be characterized by a continuous and critical reflexivity regarding its epistemology and
praxis. Such reflexivity will get a researcher thinking: who is dictionary and dictionary re-
search for, and how does lexicographical knowledge support their interests? The ontologic-
al and epistemological positions adopted by CLDS entail embedding lexicographical
research and practice in broader social and cultural contexts. Another mission of Critical
Lexicographical Discourse Studies is to question some of the linguistic and lexicographical
categorizations and norms introduced by European linguistics which have tended to be
374 Wenge Chen

taken as universal and received no further critique or challenge (Hornscheidt 2011), which
is also part of postcolonial linguistics.
Methodologically, CLDS does not privilege a certain method; it adheres to the research
ethics that consider human emancipation, and which address social inequality. It adopts an

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anti-hegemonic, and critical standpoint which requires a certain amount of intellectual and
moral wisdom because it invariably engenders vigorous opposition from interests vested in
the status quo.
The adjective ‘critical’ in Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies emphasizes the con-
tinued need to critically reflect on the lexicographical practices and norms in the research.
The critical perspective means that the researchers need to make clear their political stance
as ‘critique’ is naturally subjective. The notion of criticism is taken from Critical Discourse
Studies and the tenet of Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies is identical to that of
Critical Discourse Studies. Therefore, the principles of Critical Discourse Studies are
adopted and revised for and made relevant to Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies:

1) CLDS addresses social problems

As with CDS, a central claim of CLDS is that major social and political processes and move-
ments have a partly linguistic-discursive character and that social and political changes in con-
temporary society generally include a substantive element of cultural and ideological change.
CLDS highlights linguistic and semiotic analysis and links such analysis to problems of social
processes and struggles of dominated groups. That is, the focus of the CLDS analysis is not on
language per se or the use of language, but on the partially linguistic character of social and
cultural processes and structures. CLDS may be used to address how hegemony has come into
being in English lexicography and how such hegemony manifests linguistically. For example,
we may investigate, as Benson (2002) did, how the lexicographers of the OED create a ‘lexical
panopticon’, within which the historical depth and geographical breadth of the language and
the world could be exposed for examination from the perspective of the linguistic centre. To
take an example, the OED (OED 1989) defines ‘Opium War’ as:

a war waged by Britain against China (1839–1842) following China’s attempt to prohibit the im-
portation of opium into China; also, a later war (1856–1860) against China by Britain and France.

The OED’s definition attributes the opium war to China’s act of ‘prohibiting’ the import-
ation of opium, which contradicts China’s official view which attributes it to the European
imperialist aggressors. CLDS may also be used to examine how the dictionary as discourse
influences social understanding of what a language actually is and what the world is like.
For example, in Chen (2015), I showcase how A New English-Chinese Dictionary, the most
popular bilingual dictionary in China, appropriated the dominant ‘classism’ discourse and
‘revolutionary’ (source) language in their text, and constructed the so-called ‘revolutionary
English’ and ‘othered’ the western imperialist nations. A CLDS researcher will set out to ex-
plicate the social, political, and historical conditions that shape the dictionary as it is/was,
and should seek to address social problems to be socially accountable.

2) Power relations in the lexicographical practice are discursive

CLDS highlights the substantively linguistic and discursive nature of social relations of
power in contemporary societies. It examines how power relations are exercised and negoti-
ated in discourse. It not only pays attention to power in discourse, i.e. the capacity to
Towards a Discourse Approach to Critical Lexicography 375

control participants in the discourse but also to power over discourse, i.e. the capacity to
control and change the ground rules of discursive practices and the structure of the order of
discourse. For example, we can focus on discursive aspects of power struggle and of the
transformation of power relations through the examination of the development and change

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of relevant lexicographical discourse. The tension between regional English lexicography
and central English lexicography can be partly seen as ongoing hegemonic struggle in dis-
course and over discourse. As an example, we may explore how the rise of American lexi-
cography and later Australian and South African lexicography have led to a collapse in the
lexicographical wall and disrupted the existing order and how these once ‘regional’ English
dictionaries have produced a new perspective on the (heterogeneous) language that is
English. Or as Benson (2002) inspires, we can go on to unveil the discursive construction of
the English dictionaries as an object and the authority of the Centre English lexicography
through scrutiny of dictionary reviews written by lexicographers. My (Chen 2017) examin-
ation of how Chinese lexicographers and their British counterparts negotiated with each
other over the definitions of and examples for some words and terms in a bilingualized dic-
tionary is representative of studies on the discursive struggle in the lexicographical practice.

3) Lexicographical discourse constitutes society and culture

It is a key claim of CLDS that discourse is constituted by society and culture but also more
importantly it constitutes them. That is, there exists a dialectical relation between discourse
and society. The power of discourse lies in the fact that every instance of language use con-
tributes to reproducing and/or transforming society and culture. It simultaneously consti-
tutes a representation of the world, relations and identities. The implication of this principle
is that we can examine how the dominant central English dictionaries are shaped as a result
of the Centre-Periphery power relations or how lexicographical discourse at different times
may represent the language and the world and construct the lexicographer’s identities. For
example, in Chen (2018), I exemplify how discursive and language resources were appropri-
ated by bilingual lexicographers to establish solidarity with the powerful linguistic commu-
nity, and to create affiliation with members of their community, and thus to avoid political
consequences. One example is that when a word is defined, its political meaning would be
prioritized. Also, in Chen (2018), I show how the bilingual dictionary as the most-widely
circulated bilingual dictionary in China helped to shape Chinese society and culture and
vice versa, which is why Fishman calls to ‘interpret dictionaries in context and see them as
both resultant of and constructive of their contexts’ (Fishman 1995: 34).

4) Lexicographical discourse does ideological work

Dictionary-making involves using language to represent the language, or — as Benson
(2002) argues — a dictionary is a meta-language about the language and a representation of
the world/society seen through the lexicographer’s perspective, which may also be subject
to editorial and national censorship. Lexicographers have to constantly make choices
among available (meta) language(s), choices that are often tacit, but are never unimportant
or inconsequential. They are not immune from ideology. Ideologies as ways of representing
and constructing society reproduce unequal relations of power, relations of domination and
exploitation. The language used by the lexicographers is seen as a social practice, ‘both
reflecting and producing ideologies in society’ (Tabbert 2015: 35). To determine whether a
discursive event does ideological work, Fairclough (1992b) and van Dijk (2003) insist that
376 Wenge Chen

besides the analysis of texts, how texts are interpreted and received, and what social effects
they have should be considered. In the case of lexicography, we can examine how ‘our’ and
‘their’ languages and people are constructed in the dictionary (Benson 2002), how sexism,
colonialism, gender, ageism are constructed in the lexicographical discourse (Tenorio 2000;

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Moon 2014), and relate them to social, economic and historical power relations between
dominant and subordinate groups. It is also important to embrace variable, idiosyncratic
uptake of lexicographical text and discourse by dictionary users (cf. Bartlett 2012).

5) Lexicographical discourse is historical

Discourse is not produced without context and cannot be understood without taking the
context into consideration. It is always related to the past and connected to other discourse
produced earlier, as well as those discourses produced synchronically and subsequently.
That is why the concept of intertextuality is rather useful in CLDS. For example, we need to
examine how the lexicographical discourse relates to other mainstream discourse, political
or institutional. A dictionary definition is always only a (small) part of the social and cogni-
tive factors being brought to bear on the process of understanding a lexical item: there is
also a mixture of fore-knowledge, of use, and of experimentation. It therefore follows that
it is a misapprehension or myth that a dictionary definition is ever entirely self-sufficient in
its explicatory power (Seargeant 2011). It is intertextual. For example, by tracing the pro-
cess of hybridization of lexicographical discourse and adding a historical dimension to the
linguistic analysis of a lexicographic text, I (Chen 2015) show how and why democratiza-
tion and commodification of lexicographic discourse in China take place.

6) The link between lexicographical text and society is mediated

The relation between text and society is not direct but indirect or mediated. It is mediated
by ‘orders of discourse’ (Fairclough 1992b), the practice of social actors (Smith 1990), and
by social cognition (van Dijk 1985). For a Critical Discourse Studies approach to lexicog-
raphy, we can show what changes have taken place in Chinese (English) lexicography, in
the relationship between lexicography and politics, and how in Chinese society and culture
at a more general level these are partly realized in changes in the lexicographical order of
discourse, and in how lexicographical texts draw upon and articulate together discourses
and genres, which had traditionally been kept apart. Such new articulations of discourses
and genres are in turn realized in features of language, making an indirect, mediated link be-
tween sociocultural processes and linguistic properties of texts. ‘Lexicographic discourse is
deeply embedded in certain ideological and social structures, reflecting the lexicographers’
understandings of the society at that time. They are stored in the minds of lexicographers in
the form of mental models and will ultimately determine the form and content of the
dictionary’s discursive behaviour. In turn, the lexicographers’ discursive practice influences
the public cognition, and consequently their act, which finally leads to the change in the so-
cial structure’ (Chen 2015).

7) Lexicographical discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory

The way discourse is interpreted varies according to the volume of contextual information
included, as well as the intended audience. The readers/listeners, with their varied emotion-
al, formal and cognitive schemata, may arrive at different interpretations of the same text
(Fairclough and Wodak 1997). Historically, the dictionary has been regarded as objective
Towards a Discourse Approach to Critical Lexicography 377

and authoritative, which is minimally subject to ideological critique by ordinary dictionary

users. Knowledge of how a dictionary is made and the power relations in English lexicog-
raphy would make it easier to identify manifest and latent meanings, and to find out more
about the lexicographical polices and language polices involved in a dictionary project. To

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conduct a critical reading of a lexicographical text, a systematic methodology and a thor-
ough investigation of the context is needed. Therefore, the text is deconstructed and
embedded in its social conditions and is linked to ideologies and power relationships. A crit-
ical audience may come to different readings from those of a non-critical audience. It is
where CDS as well as CLDS differ from pure hermeneutics. CLDS also distinguishes be-
tween interpretation and explanation: interpretation is concerned with text and interaction
while explanation is concerned with the relationship between interaction and social context
(Fairclough 1989: 26). One’s analysis of the text is shaped and coloured by one’s interpret-
ation of its relationship to discourse processes and wider social processes. Furthermore, it is
stated that interpretations and explanations are never finished and authoritative, but that
they are dynamic and open to new contexts and new information.

8) Lexicographical discourse is a form of social action

CLDS is socially committed, or — as Kachru (1995) states — it emphasizes the social ac-
countability of the lexicographer’s enterprise, particularly in the areas of gender, race, reli-
gion, and ideology. It is seen as a social movement. Its principal aims are to uncover
opaqueness and power relationships in lexicographical discourse and help to address social
inequality and injustice. The CLDS work can be used in schools to raise the ‘critical lan-
guage awareness’ (Fairclough 1992a) and improve the critical literacy. A central task of
CLDS is to reveal the hegemonic struggle between the Centre and Periphery English lexicog-
raphy and to help the lexicographers in the Periphery Circle to reclaim their agency and ne-
gotiate a favourable position, and to reveal the disjuncture of the lexicographical
discourses, so as to tap their emancipatory potential. One such example is seen in
Hornscheidt (2011), who through the investigation of post-colonial continuities in Danish
monolingual dictionaries with regard to the wording of colonialism, finds that instead of
being perceived and denoted as ideology, colonialism is solely conceptualized as a historical
phase. Hornscheidt (2011) argues that such a conceptualization makes a critical attitude to-
wards colonialism in a subtle way impossible, and contributes powerfully to a wider ignor-
ance of dictionary users towards the ideological site of colonialism, as well as having an
impact, up to the present day, on the perception of racism. The proposal of discourse lexi-
cography, which reconstructs semantics out of a certain historical, societal and communica-
tive context (K€amper and Klosa 2010), can also be seen as a response to the call for the
lexicographer’s social accountability in that a precise description of a lexeme in a certain
discourse will help the users learn about the history of the word.
In sum, CLDS explores how and why some lexicographical meanings become privileged,
taken for granted and reified. They explain why power relations that appear fixed within
organizations result from ongoing discursive struggles via a process of negotiation. CLDS
also highlights the dialectic relationship between power and resistance, especially the trans-
formative nature of lexicographical discourse. In this regard, CLDS take an intertextual ap-
proach that is sensitive to historical and social context. It focuses on how lexicographical
discourse appropriates other discourse and social practices, i.e. the intertextual and interdis-
cursive aspects of the lexicographical discourse. Such a critical approach contributes to
378 Wenge Chen

unpacking the implied ‘patterns and commonalities of knowledge and structures’ in (lexico-
graphical) discourse (Wodak 2008: 6) and helps address social and linguistic inequities.

4.2 A proposed analytical framework for and methods of CLDS

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The focus of Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies is on the dialectic relationship be-
tween the lexicographical discourse and social change. To explore the dialectic relationship,
a three-tiered analytical framework (see Figure 1) based on Fairclough (1992b) is proposed
as follows:

1. Describing the text (the product of discourse, and in lexicography, the dictionary
as text);
2. Interpreting the relationship between the text and interaction (the process of production,
i.e. the process by means of which the dictionary is produced and received);
3. Explaining the relationship between interaction and social context (i.e. socio-historical
conditions governing the process of production and of interpretation).

Figure 1. A three-tiered analytical framework of CLDS

The analytical framework in Figure 1 consists of three tiers of analysis: text analysis, pro-
cess analysis, and social analysis. The core is textual analysis, that is, a CLDS analyst will
first conduct an analysis of the dictionary as text, examining for example the choice of vo-
cabulary in explaining the meaning of a word, the choice of illustrative examples, and the
order of senses. Then, how the dictionary is produced, distributed and consumed will be
explored followed by an explanation of the social context in which the dictionary is pro-
duced and consumed.

4.3 Some central questions for critical lexicographical discourse studies

Within the theoretical framework outlined above, I put forward some tentative questions
for Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies. They consist of macro-level questions and
micro-level questions, the latter based on Hornscheidt (2008).
Macro-level questions for critical lexicographical discourse studies may include:

1. What roles does power play in the compiling, publication and distribution of
dictionaries?
Towards a Discourse Approach to Critical Lexicography 379

2. What is the relationship between the dictionary and the construction of nation-
al identities?
3. How do power and resistance interplay in the construction of a dictionary?
4. How are the norms of dictionary compilation and evaluation established

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and contested?
5. How are the authority and objectivity of the dictionary constructed, and how can they
be deconstructed?
6. How is the unequal relationship between the lexicographers and the dictionary user
made manifest? What is the nature of such relationship, and what are the effects of
such a relationship?
7. How does the dictionary as discourse constitute an identity for the lexicographers and
the dictionary user?
8. How does the dictionary do ideological work; for example, how are sexism, racism,
ageism and colonialism constructed? What are the effects of such construction?
9. How does the dictionary represent the world and languages? How does power play
out in the definition of words in the dictionary? How are ‘us’ and ‘other’ constructed
by the dictionary?
10. How does the dictionary relate to history? How does the dictionary evolve? How does
the dictionary create intertextuality with other discursive and social practices? How
does the dictionary as a genre relate to other genres?
11. How does the dictionary as discourse constitute society and culture, and how do soci-
ety and culture in turn shape the dictionary? How is culture at a more general level
partly realized in changes in the lexicographical order of discourse? And how does the
dictionary as discourse/genre draw up and articulate together other discourses
and genres?
12. How can the lexicographical practice as a form of social action bring about social
changes, and what are the emancipatory potentials of the dictionary as discourse?
How can the dictionary as discourse help to achieve social equality and
human progress?
13. How does socially constructed, politically motivated, and historically determined lex-
icographical discourse impact on learning, and teaching, and how can we study and
understand the impact?

Micro-level questions of critical lexicographical discourse studies, which are based on

Hornscheidt (2008), may include:

1. General information in the preface

• What is said in the dictionary regarding the sources used? What kind of language
usage is represented by the sources? Which sources are not considered? What norms
are established?
• What do the dictionary entries say about the norms established? Is there any explicit
reflection on the semantic and/or pragmatic theories underlying the dictionary project?
2. Word entries
• Which words count as word entries in a dictionary?
• How can the absence of certain word entries reveal attitudes towards the assumed
centrality of certain concepts and a neglect of others?
• Whose perspective is represented in the word entries?
380 Wenge Chen

3. Meaning explanations
• What perspective is taken in the meaning explanations and how are they thus general-
ized, neutralized, or normalized?
• Are there any explicit or implicit evaluations concerning the meaning evaluations?

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4. Concrete usage examples
• What are the sources for the examples provided? Are the examples authentic or
made-up?
• What are the concrete functions of the usage example in a dictionary entry? What is
depicted as the (proto)typical usage context of a certain term by the usage examples?
5. Metalinguistic comments
• How are certain usages neutralized and evaluated in metalinguistic comments?
• What is represented as not-normal or deviant usage by metalinguistic comments?
• Which groups of people are explicitly named in the context of metalinguistic com-
ments? (See Hornscheidt 2008 for more details.)
6. Interdiscursive features of the dictionary
• What are the generic features of the dictionary as a genre?
• With what other discourses does the dictionary have interdiscursive links?

4.4 Methods of critical lexicographical discourse studies

In the previous section, I compared the dictionary as discourse to a map. A map is not the
territory but in practice it produces our understanding of geography and the act of mapping
shapes our territorial thinking and behaviour (Berti 2017). Likewise, the dictionary as dis-
course is not the language and the world it represents, but its form shapes our knowledge of
the language and our understanding of the world and the language. Such a comparison
emphasizes the role of differences and contrapositions. Therefore, comparison and contrast
is the ideal method in conducting CLDS. Researchers can compare alternate lexicographical
discourses and thus identify areas of tension. Differences break down the hegemonic sense
of normality and standardization and can serve as a critical point of departure in CLDS.
Detecting the meaningful contrast or transformation holding between two relevant diction-
aries is a sine qua non of the effectiveness of CLDS (Chen 2015).

5. A sample case
To exemplify how to conduct critical lexicographical studies from a critical discourse per-
spective, I present a simplified version of such a study (see Chen 2018 for a complete one).
In Chen (2018), I aim to explore how Chinese bilingual lexicographers in the 1970s appro-
priated discursive and language resources to establish solidarity with the powerful linguistic
community and to create affiliation with members of their revolutionary community to
avoid political consequences. The perspective I adopt in the study (Chen 2018) is that dic-
tionaries are not only reference tools but are also discourses in their own right, which, like
other kinds of discourse, are culturally determined and culturally determining. This study
applies a research method of comparison and contrast, focusing on the differences between
one English-Chinese bilingual dictionary in the 1970s, A New English-Chinese Dictionary
(NECD 1975) (hereinafter NECD-75) and its updated version in the 21st century and
American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) (Morris 1976), a US-made monolingual English dic-
tionary of the same period. The study can be divided into three stages: it first provides some
Towards a Discourse Approach to Critical Lexicography 381

background on the central topic of the text, i.e. Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s-
1970s (social analysis). The analysis then moves on to discuss the conditions of text produc-
tion, distribution and reception that lexicographers operated under at the time the diction-
ary was being compiled (discourse analysis). Finally, the analysis addresses meaning shift,

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social actor representation and intertextuality/interdiscursivity in the lexicographical text
(text analysis).

Social analysis
It should be noted first that the social analysis is not a neutral backdrop to a critical analysis
of a text, but is itself an ideologically informed construction. The Cultural Revolution was
launched in China in 1966 on the allegation that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the gov-
ernment and society at large, aiming to restore capitalism. The revolution was to eradicate
the so-called ‘poisonous remnants of feudalism, capitalism and revisionism’ from the
Chinese society. Red Guard Groups, mainly consisting of youth, were formed to carry out
the revolution, which caused widespread class struggles in all walks of life. As the main tool
of the class struggle, language served as an identification tool to bond and to separate one
group from another. To participate in the revolution meant to use the approved language to
say things which were based on the Red Books and participation in the revolutionary dis-
course would bring rewards while non-participation incurred punishment or trouble.
As during the Cultural Revolution, English was considered to be the language of ‘the
imperialists’ and of ‘the class enemies’, its linguistic value was drastically reduced. English
scholars were easily suspected of ‘worshiping things foreign and fawning on foreign
countries’ (崇洋媚外) or ‘fraternizing with foreign countries’ (里通国外). Those who failed
to convince the Red Guards of their loyalty to revolution were either ‘transformed through
labour’ or locked in the cowshed and suffered heavy criticism and both verbal and bodily
attacks. Many were forced to leave the teaching jobs and thus were deprived of the right to
use the language of the Revolution. Against such a socio-political background, to save
themselves from political consequences and to keep their teaching jobs, the English practi-
tioners had to actively project themselves as ‘revolutionaries’ by making clear their political
stands and attitudes in revolution.

Discourse analysis
The dictionary under scrutiny, A New English-Chinese Dictionary (NECD-75) edited by Lu
Gusun et al. was first published in 1975, but the project started much earlier, in 1970, when
the Cultural Revolution was at its peak. Like works in other fields, the project of A New
English-Chinese Dictionary was under the control of ‘workers-peasants-soldiers propa-
ganda teams’ (hereinafter Propaganda Team), whose job was to ensure that foreign lan-
guage dictionaries were, like all other works, vehicles of revolutionary discourse and tools
of linguistic engineering. Though Lu and other compilers were summoned from different
institutions to work on the English dictionary (Foreign languages were considered to be im-
portant weapons of struggle), they felt like ‘treading as if on thin ice’, afraid of saying
‘politically incorrect words’. The Propaganda Team ordered that the lexicographic project
should follow the principle of ‘me-centred’, that is, everything concerning the project should
reflect the best interests of the revolution underway and that all possible timely words and
expressions related to the new things and events about the Cultural Revolution should be
registered in the dictionary. The dictionary compilers were asked to think hard to
382 Wenge Chen

incorporate as many as possible of dominant political and revolutionary sayings into the
dictionary and to promulgate so-called ‘model opera’, ‘Five-Seven Cadres’ Schools’ and
ideas of ‘going and working in the countryside and mountainous areas’, etc., things that
they considered to be the products of civilization. On the contrary, those words and expres-

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sions that were thought to be praising capitalism had to be discarded.
To ensure the practicality of the dictionary, Lu Gusun, the editor, even managed to
‘smuggle’ some fresh English expressions from the English dictionary and mingle them with
the ‘red quotations’ into their own dictionary. Such appropriation results in hybridization
of the dictionary as a text and signals the lexicographers’ identity in the 1970s (See Chen
2018 for more details about ‘social analysis’ and ‘discourse analysis’).

Text analysis
In the text analysis section of Chen (2018), I describe the differences between the three lex-
icographical texts concerning the preface, wordlist, definition, illustrative examples, meta-
linguistic comments, etc., and relates the dictionary’s intertextual and interdiscursive
features to context. Constrained by space, some aspects of the differences revealed in Chen
(2018) are only mentioned briefly here.
At the level of sense order, Chen (2018) finds that NECD-75 tends to prioritize the polit-
ical sense of a word over its everyday sense. For example, it highlights the political and so-
cial senses of ‘class’, by placing in the first order ‘阶级’, which corresponds to the third
sense of ‘class’ in AHD. The prioritization of political senses also applies to words such as
‘revolution’, ‘party’, ‘comrade’, ‘people’, ‘landlord’, among many others.
At the definition level, Chen (2018) finds that NECD-75 ameliorates words that have a
negative meaning in AHD. For example, in NECD-75, ‘dictatorship’ is given the Chinese
equivalent ‘专政’ and is illustrated with examples of ‘Long live the victory of the dictator-
ship of the proletariat!’. It also derogates words that convey no affective meaning in AHD,
as in giving the Chinese equivalents ‘法西斯匪徒’ for ‘fascist’. The Chinese phrase ‘匪徒’
(lit. gangster or bandit) signals the lexicographers’ negative emotional attitude to fascism.
The political orientation can also be observed at other levels, such as metalinguistic com-
ments. For example, in NECD-Y75, ‘militant’ was defined as ‘斗士 (特指美国)’ (particularly
referring to the USA). The comment in the bracket explicitly suggests that militant was spe-
cific to the USA. At level of illustrative examples, I extracted all the illustrative examples
(which were all invented) in the dictionary, which comprise the data for a statistical
analysis. Then, using the corpus tool, AntConc (Anthony 2014) and setting the p value as
p＜0.05 (its default value), Chen (2018) compared the corpus of NECD-Y75’s illustrative
examples (as an observed corpus) to the Brown Corpus (as a reference corpus), thus
obtaining the keyword list of the lexicographic discourse. The results show that the top
keywords are politics-oriented words such as ‘enemy’, ‘revolution’, ‘worker’, ‘comrade’
and ‘imperial’.
In Chen (2018), I also analysed the representation of social actors in the lexicographical
text and found that those social actors in ‘US’ group were constructed as positive while
those in ‘Them’ group were negative, as in ‘Dig out a class enemy as one would a time
bomb’ and ‘The Chinese people will never be intimidated by wars threats, including nu-
clear war.’
Then, Chen (2018) goes on to analyse the intertextual and interdiscursive features of the
dictionary and conclude that the dictionary as a genre strikes very obvious intertextual links
Towards a Discourse Approach to Critical Lexicography 383

with the dominant revolutionary and classism discourses in that it cites many popular polit-
ical quotes and slogans and renders them into English as illustrative examples, like ‘We
firmly support the Asian, African and Latin American peoples in their struggle for liber-
ation!’ and ‘Dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere, and never seek hegemony’.

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Thus, in Chen (2018), I not only describe what relevant affiliative identities the lexicog-
raphers communicate in the lexicographical texts in China in the 1970s, and interpret how
those identities are communicated in concrete texts, but also explain why affiliative identi-
ties are conceptualized and communicated in the way they are. Such a three-tiered analytical
framework, which takes into account the social context, overcomes the limitations of the
traditional sociolinguistic approach to critical lexicography. Therefore, instead of viewing
lexicography as a disembodied activity taking place in a vacuum, I (Chen 2018) propose
interpreting dictionaries in context and exploring how dictionaries are culturally deter-
mined and culturally determining.
To sum up, in doing a CLDS, a researcher starts with an analysis of order of discourse to
reveal the latent social rules that govern the production of discourse (in this case, how the
revolutionary discourse dominated and governed the public discourses and their ways of
saying). Then, the researcher goes on to conduct interactional analysis, which consists of
interdiscursive analysis and linguistic and semiotic analysis (in this sample case, an analysis
of how the lexicographic discourse was interdiscursively linked with other discourse and
genres and analysis of lexis and clauses). Such an integrated analysis of textual and social
structures helps reveal the internal relationship between them. It should be noted, however,
that the framework proposed is not necessarily an ideal one. It may need to be modified
when applied to different types of dictionaries. For example, when examining synchronic
dictionaries that deal with the language and its word-stock at a certain point in time, a
CLDS researcher may relate them to their situated contexts as in Chen (2015). In contrast,
for diachronic dictionaries, a research project may seek to uncover whether certain mean-
ings/constructions have shifted at different historical stages, and what may account for such
a shift (cf. Benson 2002).

6. Conclusion
To date, there has been no serious attempt to challenge the definition in the dictionary.
Many of the complaints mentioned above about dictionaries, lexicographers or publishers
are only limited to a small circle. Challenging sexism, racism, androcentrism, ethnocentrism
and colonialism in the dictionary is difficult because it is so deeply embedded in many other
mainstream discourses, from news, textbooks to advertising discourses, which all form
intertextual links with lexicographical discourse. A discourse approach to critical lexicog-
raphy motivates a critical look at the discourses and counter-discourses that shape and re-
shape practices in the field of lexicography and points to the fact that languages cannot be
described but only represented. The representational nature of the dictionary implies that
the authority of the dictionary as a source of meaning and the objectivity of the dictionary
in describing the language and the world have to be seriously questioned. In an era where
dictionary information is increasingly sourced online and when the dictionary power base is
shifting away from traditional publisher brand, we need to reflect on who is controlling,
providing, or mediating the dictionary text (Google, the Wikipedia enterprise and its back-
ers, the electronics manufacturers or software providers?)4. By recognizing the
384 Wenge Chen

representational and discursive nature of the dictionary and power play therein, lexicogra-
phers can open themselves to alternative meanings and alternative possibilities.
Problem-oriented CLDS, with its potential to create critical reflexivity and critical lan-
guage awareness, has important implications not only for the ways lexicographical profes-

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sionals analyse and interpret lexicographical events/acts, but also for the strategies of
dictionary-making. It has long been pointed out that the dictionary does not exist in a
socio-political vacuum (Frawley 1985); postcolonial lexicography, especially in Australia,
has shown that focusing on socio-political themes not only wins them national pride but an
international market and has proven that the centre–periphery model does not have to be
the only model available to lexicographers (cf. Benson 2002), and that such socio-politically
oriented lexicography does not necessarily come at the expense of the acquisition of the
English language. Instead, as in the educational contexts, it is conducive to promoting critic-
al reflexivity, conscious agency, and critical subject positions, to helping orientate and re-
orientate lexicographical action in a contingent world where change is continuous and thus
contributes to the healthy development of lexicography and the languages it represents. It is
worth noting that the dominant Anglo-American dictionaries have kept producing regional-
ly adapted dictionaries to respond to overseas markets, which is beneficial both for World
English lexicography and World Englishes, and for dictionary users. On the practical side,
discourse lexicography, which represents the vocabulary of a language in relationship to the
item, to the speakers, to a certain period, and to a special corpus (K€
amper and Klosa 2010),
is further proof of the necessity and possibility of such a trend. Additionally, in the contem-
porary ‘de-centralization’ era when crowd-sourced and web-based dictionaries are gaining
more prominence and attention, as are ‘minority dictionaries’5 (cf. feminist dictionaries: see
Russell 2012; regional English dictionaries: see Huddart 2014), CLDS is especially helpful
as it may help reveal how lexicographers not in the Centre could empower themselves and
how their potential alternative view of a language and the world could be different to the
mainstream establishment texts and contribute to linguistic diversity and thus so-
cial equality.
The conceptual and analytical framework proposed here, with its limitations, provides a
starting point for questioning what lexicographers do and why they do it. It contributes
to unmasking and denaturalizing the hidden power relationship between the lexicographical
act and the wider sociocultural and socio-political structures that impact upon the act.
Lexicographical ‘discourses are never completely cohesive and devoid of internal tensions
and hence are always contested to some degree’ (Hardy and Phillips 2004: 304). A discourse
approach to critical lexicography opens a space to understand different meaning-making
practices and disputes in English lexicography. Maintaining a keen interest in the
workings of power together with concern for issues of inequitable access to language and
knowledge and their effects, CLDS will shed light on the opportunities for change and
emancipation.

Notes
1. https:// www. theguardian. com/ books/ 2016/ jan/ 25/ oxford- dictionary- review- sex
ist- language- rabid- feminist- gender, last accessed 09/08/2018.
2. This is a point made by an anonymous reviewer.
3. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for the sharing about his/her understand-
ing of ‘colony text’.
Towards a Discourse Approach to Critical Lexicography 385

4. My thanks go to an anonymous reviewer for contributing this idea.

5. This is a point made by an anonymous reviewer.

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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (18FYY031), Fujian New-
Century Excellent Talents Program (2017), China Scholarship Council (2017), Xiamen
University of Technology Talent Project (YSK17001R), and XMUT Scientific Research
Promotion Program (XPDST18010).
I am grateful to Tom Bartlett, Lise Fontaine, Derek Irwin, Robert Lew, and two anonymous
reviewers for their critical but insightful comments on the earlier drafts of this paper. My thanks
also go to Robert Lew, Zhu Yumin, Xie Jun, Wu Jianping, and Anna Lewis for proofreading and
editing this paper. All remaining faults, however, are my own.

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