Professor Lynda Mugglestone: List of publications

Review of Jürg R. Schwyter. Dictating to the Mob: The History of the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. 2016. xiv + 281 pp. Hb (9780198736738)

OXFORD HANDBOOKS IN LINGUISTICS Recently Published THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF JAPANESE LINGUISTICS Edited by Shigeru Miyagawa and Mamoru Saito THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF THE HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS Edited ...

The Handbook of English Pronunciation presents a comprehensive exploration of English pronunciation with essential topics for applied linguistics researchers and teachers, including language acquisition, varieties of English, historical ...

83. 84. A Companion to Tudor Literature A Companion to Crime Fiction A Companion to Medieval Poetry A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture A Companion to the American Short Story A Companion to American

With scholarship at once impeccable and approachable, the authors describe and explain the constantly changing sounds, words, meanings, and grammar of English. This is a book for everyone interested in the language, present and past.

With scholarship at once impeccable and approachable, the authors describe and explain the constantly changing sounds, words, meanings, and grammar of English. This is a book for everyone interested in the language, present and past.

© Cambridge University Press 2012. A book containing the words of any language in alphabetical order, with explanations of their meaning; a lexicon; a vocabulary; a word-book. An army, or a parliament, is a collection of men; a dictionary, or nomenclature, is a collection of words. Watts. By the eighteenth century the monolingual English dictionary, alphabetically organized and equipped with some form of definition for the words which it contained, was, as the lexicographer Benjamin Martin confirms, already a familiar work of reference: It is customary among all People to make an orderly Arrangement of all the Letters used in their Language, which we call by the Greek name Alphabet; as also of all the Words and Terms which compose the same: And such a Collection or Catalogue of Words is by Us called a Dictionary. As Johnson commented, this was in many ways to be an “age of dictionaries” (Letters, 1:79), characterized by both abundance and diversity. Small dictionaries “fit for the pocket” vied with larger multivolume works for a share of the public's attention. Dictionaries were written for school and home, for incidental reference or systematic self-improvement, and offered information on a variety of heads. When Johnson began composing his own dictionary in 1746, Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary already contained 42,000 word entries. A new edition of Bailey appeared in 1755, containing some 65,000 words and actively competing with Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, which had been published in April of that year. Earlier English dictionaries While Johnson is popularly described as the “father of the dictionary,” the reality was therefore rather different. The monolingual English dictionary can be traced to 1604, with the publication of Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, aimed at “unskilful readers” and containing roughly 2,500 “hard, usual words” such as bankerupt and rapacitie. Nevertheless, as Johnson argued in his Plan of a Dictionaryof the English Language (1747), “a very miscellaneous idea” had so far seemed to characterize English lexicography (Works, 18:30). The image of the dictionary as a remedy for educational deficits of particular kinds-able in particular to democratize the kind of polysyllabic and Latinate vocabulary which marked the classically educated “gentleman”-remained popular. The Glossographia Anglicana Nova: Interpreting Such Hard Words of Whatever Language, as Are at Present Used in the English Tongue (1707) therefore stressed its utility to those who could find themselves “not able to read a good Historian, or any Polite English Writer without an Interpreter.” Thomas Dyche and William Pardon likewise stressed the value of their own New General English Dictionary (1735) for the “Improvement of such as are Unacquainted with the Learned Languages.” “Hard words” had pride of place in most early English dictionaries, and familiar words and meanings were often neglected.

© Lynda Mugglestone 1995; 2003. All rights reserved. This book is a history of the rise and fall of the English accent as a badge of cultural, social, and class identity. The book traces the origins of the phenomenon in late 18th-century London, follows its history through the 19th and 20th centuries, and charts its downfall during the era of New Labour. The book provides a readable account of a fascinating subject, liberally spiced with quotations from English speech and writing over the past 250 years.

Language academies, and the dictionaries they produce, are often normative and regulatory, seeking to sanction preferred usages (traditionally those based in formal, literary contexts) and to proscribe others which, for various reasons, may be seen as less favored. Beginning in the Renaissance with the Italian Accademia della Crusca and extending to many nation-states (though not Great Britain), the role of the academy has often been explicitly interventionist, especially in terms of the legitimization of new words and meanings or, as with the current concerns of the Académie Française, in the attempt to restrain the influence of the Anglophone world in the lexis of science and technology. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.