"Stop focusing on what the dictionary says!" Meta-perspectives on lexicographical resources of Mountaineering English on Reddit

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-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 languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)373-401
Number of pages29
JournalDictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America
Volume45
Issue number2
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85210405736
Mendeley b8995966-bf83-3e54-bc33-96b163018df2

Keywords

Keywords

  • Reddit, attitudes, computer-mediated communication, lexicographical resources, meta-perspectives, mountaineering, social media, specialized register