"Stop focusing on what the dictionary says!" Meta-perspectives on lexicographical resources of Mountaineering English on Reddit
Research output: Contribution to journal › Research article › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
This study investigates a corpus of five mountaineering-related subreddits (r/alpinism, r/climbing, r/climbharder, r/climbingpartners, and r/mountaineering) with regard to meta-perspectives on lexicographical resources, or how and why users criticize, support, and comment on dictionaries and other lexicographical resources as well as individual entries in these resources. To this end, all word-forms of dictionar*, encyclo*, glossar*, and lexico* in the subreddits were extracted using AntConc (Anthony 2023) and analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The study not only shows that Reddit is a useful resource for the investigation of meta-perspectives on lexicographical resources among a specialized community, but also that these attitudes are complex. Users discuss to what extent they believe dictionary definitions to be correct or incorrect, and they reference dictionary entries to support their arguments with what they consider to be authoritative resources, but they also contrast the lived experience of the mountaineer with that of the "armchair" lexicographer. While a dictionary entry may represent authority and thus lend credibility to an opinion to some users, other users dismiss such entries—or even entire lexicographical resources—as being irrelevant or uninformative. Overall, the paper contributes a piece to the puzzle of how people perceive lexicographical resources by examining how the resources are discussed on social media—a space that has become important in many people's everyday lives and is therefore an important domain for lexicographical research beyond dictionary structure or usage.
Details
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 373-401 |
Number of pages | 29 |
Journal | Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America |
Volume | 45 |
Issue number | 2 |
Publication status | Published - 2024 |
Peer-reviewed | Yes |
External IDs
Scopus | 85210405736 |
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Mendeley | b8995966-bf83-3e54-bc33-96b163018df2 |
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- Reddit, attitudes, computer-mediated communication, lexicographical resources, meta-perspectives, mountaineering, social media, specialized register