A conception of language embodied in the dictionary

The dictionary serves many people as a formal, practical and understandable statement on the structure, content and use of their language. It can offer linguists much insight into the general user's view of language. Getting at a lay conception with a lexicographical orientation is motivated by the dictionary's easy accessibility for the average Western reader/writer who invests it with as much authority in his lexical world as the Bible in his spiritual world. This study establishes first the dictionary's indebtedness to written language and its maintenance historically of a formalist, literary emphasis. Such a background developed from ancient social listing practices of a commercial and religious nature. The implications and repercussions of literacy are traced as providing an idealized written language which has come to stand for what people understand as 'real' language. The average dictionary user can misinterpret the lexicographical metalanguage when he confuses it with the logical and relatively objective style of the formal language of social and governmental institutions. Much of the confusability of dictionary entries stems from issues of feature markedness, the atomization of meaning, the 'objectness' of words and the dictionary's officialization of words. This study works through some of the socio-cultural and political ramifications that are reflected in lexicographical presentations and concludes that a full understanding of what and how people conceive of language derives in part from their use of the dictionary and from how they have been brought up to accord the dictionary with an authoritarian position in language matters. Deriving from this lexicographical conception of language, dictionary users alter their internal representation of language along lines of standardization, the countability and finiteneses of words, the univocality and indivisibility of word's meaning, and lastly, the pedagogical underpinnings to language's decoding on a level of "correctness.".