Late Modern Engish Glossaries as Tools of Definition and Codification

Abstract

This contribution aims to discuss instances of glossaries appended to literary and nonliterary works in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in order to investigate their function as more or less neutral sources of information on the meaning of lemmas. While on the surface such glossaries appear to be relatively innocent lists illustrating, or indeed translating, lexical items occurring in a different variety, such as we see in Scottish literary texts by Allan Ramsay or Robert Burns, in fact they reinforce the idea of the same variety being obscure, old-fashioned, and therefore inappropriate for daily usage. In other contexts, instead, glossaries laid the basis for the development of dictionaries of specialized discourse. In both cases glossaries appear to have been valuable tools for language codification, providing (often indirect) guidance to language users, while offering clarification on the semantic value of individual items.