Interview

David Crystal

David Crystal is one of the world's leading linguists. He read English at University College London from 1959, where he studied under Randolph Quirk. He published the first of his 100 or so books in 1964. He became known mainly for his research work in English language studies and in the application of linguistics to religious, educational and clinical contexts. Among his recent works are books on the world's endangered languages (Language Death, 2000), the Internet (Languages and the Internet, 2001), and Shakespeare (Shakespeare's Words, 2002).

He works from his home in Holyhead, North Wales, as a writer, editor, lecturer and broadcaster, and divides his time between work on language and work on general reference publishing. He is currently patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL). For a full list of David Crystal's publications, see the Crystal Reference site.

Professor Crystal spoke with ELT News editor Mark McBennett on a visit to Tokyo in September, 2003 with his wife and business partner Hilary.

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ELT: What brings you to Japan this time?
DC: This is a Longman visit. When I travel, it's often on behalf of somebody, the British Council or, very often, a publisher. And it's usually to promote something that I myself have written. But this time it's different. My relationship with Longman is this: Longman was the first publishing house to realize, about 30 years ago now, that it might be a good idea to get academics who are interested in semantics, dictionaries and so on into an advisory board. Put them in a think tank kind of environment and let them them talk about their ideal dictionary, what's wrong with dictionaries now, and specifically what kind of dictionaries would be of most use for foreign learners and other categories of users. And I was on that board from the very beginning, so I've seen this dictionary from its conception through four different editions over the last 30 years.

So when you use a book regularly, it becomes part of your life. And I use this book, as a native speaker, as one of my desk dictionaries. So I know it in the academic sense but also as an actual user. So I've been invited as someone who can speak about the dictionary from those two different points of view.

So why do you personally choose to use this dictionary yourself?
When a new dictionary comes out, the way it's publicized, the press and media coverage that it gets is always very focused on coverage. What are the new words, the latest words that we have to use? Words like "bling bling" this time around, for example.

But that is not the big issue with a dictionary for me. I'm interested in the treatment of entries. So when I'm working on a language topic, I'm often looking for the most succinct way of defining a term, or a good example of something to illustrate a point. And framing a definition accurately and succinctly - and in language that's no more difficult than the term you're defining in the first place - is not easy.

The thing about LDOCE, is that it has this excellent feature of a 2000-word defining vocabulary (DV), originally a tremendous innovation by Longman. So anyone with a 2000-word vocabulary - I suppose we're talking about junior high level in learner terms - is guaranteed to be able to understand any of the definitions used in the dictionary. And what I can do as a linguist is compare definitions, side by side. And because of the DV, I can see the salient points of difference much more easily than in a native speaker dictionary.

Secondly, it addresses the fundamental thing in language learning - and with over a million words in English, we're all vocabulary learners throughout our lives - and that's seeing words in clusters, in pairs. The thing about dictionaries is that they're alphabetical and no one learns words that way, letter A today, letter B tomorrow. So you have "aunt" at one end and "uncle" at the other, but they go together in real life. So if you can get away from that and present words in more natural groups or clusters, that's a major step forward in dictionary writing. LDOCE does this to a limited extent in the book itself, but much more so on the CD-ROM, in the Language Activator, which does this much more systematically than any other dictionary I know.

From a learner point of view, I imagine this must be a very important feature. Now, I'm a linguist, I'm not a language teacher and I don't quite know what it's like teaching adults or children. But it seems to me that if anything is going to help learners, it's going to be that sort of clustering feature.

But you would refer to the OED for Scrabble disputes?!
No, Chambers is the one for that. Chambers is the official dictionary for international Scrabble competition. No, I use the big OED for historical linguistic work, for references to Shakespeare or Chaucer and what have you, because it's the only one based on an analysis of their work. I and my son did a Shakespeare book last year and that was largely based on the OED.

Of course there is a correlation between the OED and LDOCE, in that they're both corpus-based dictionaries. And that's the way dictionaries have to go from now on, especially in view of how the language is developing and changing.

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