Interview
Della Summers
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Do you think that with the advances in speech recognition and other technologies, writing - and in particular handwriting - will become a marginalized skill?
Yes, I think it's imminent. I don't think it's because of speech recognition, more the Internet and mobile phones. I'm very worried about the future of young people, even in this generation, because their primary medium for written communication is not going to be the pen. Language change is inevitable, it's such a powerful force that if there's a reason for enough people to change the way they communicate, that will happen. You can no longer say, "You must never spell 'Good for you' with a 4U." Or LOL (laugh out loud) or all those abbreviations, they're all part of the language.
If you look at how people write e-mails, you can see that they're very different from...they're in between what we would call "good" English and spoken English. And punctuation is changing drastically. Our policy is to describe the way language works, not to be proscriptive, which I don't think is possible anymore. All we can do is, with an entry like "ain't" is to indicate it as "nonstandard" and "spoken." But in terms of being able to express yourself, it's a simplified form of language and that's what I'm worried about.
Then again, we're talking about the parts of the world where people have access to a computer or a mobile phone. It's very cheap to have a pen and paper, and it would be a retrograde step if that was no longer available to keep as an option. But you can see a computer orientated/non-computer divide opening up in the world.
It's interesting in the UK, where the education system ignored grammar for many years - it was regarded as impeding fluency and expression - there is a big movement back now to teaching grammar. And also to teach pragmatics and semantics, so there's more attention being given to teaching the right way to express yourself, saying the right thing in a given context, saying exactly what you mean. We realize now the importance of building strong foundations.
So now that LDOCE4 has been completed, what do you have on the back burner?
We usually have four or five dictionaries on the go, with different teams working on them. We have dictionaries at every level, from beginner picture dictionaries to the very advanced ones like the Language Activator...
Ah yes, I meant to ask you about the Activator. What is that exactly?
The Activator is my response to requests from students in research that I've done for many years. Situations where they say "I want to know when it's correct to use this word rather than that word." The Activator is so called because it "activates" your vocabulary. It concentrates on the most frequent words and phrases and brings them all together under big concept words. These are divided into headings which have options, choices which the user can make, leading to a very precise definition and lots of examples and collocation.
Okay. And back to the future?
We're publishing bilingual dictionaries, in Spanish and Italian because those are interesting languages for us to do something new and different in. What we don't do is small-scale revisions. When we bring out a new edition, it's very like bringing out a new dictionary. So much about the future is to do with technology. So we're improving our CD-ROMs all the time, making them completely interactive so that users can jump from word to word and see how words and meanings overlap, which is what we're mainly interested in.
Ms. Summers, thank you very much for taking time to speak to us.
My pleasure.
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