ON THE DESIGN OF A CENTRAL ARCHIVE FOR LEXICOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH *

With the availability of computers, lexicographical archives have gained great new capabilities. A central archive for lexicography in English will have to make full use of these. In this presentation I will not concentrate on routine techniques in the use of computers for lexicographical purposes; if a central archive is established, with proper computer facilities, techniques already developed can be taken over under the guidance of linguists, such as Dr. Rolf Stachowitz of the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas, who have thorough control of computer techniques. Moreover, by means of compact and relatively inexpensive storage devices for huge amounts of data we can duplicate readily the contents of a central archive and in this way make them available for study at various lexicographical centers. The archive would then fulfill two of the major expectations for it, that is, the provision of a central storage for all lexicographical information that has been assembled on the English language, and a facility for providing scholars with all or any desired part of this information. Instead of simply presenting techniques for computer manipulation of lexicographical data, I will discuss briefly the possibilities these techniques have given us for modifying rapidly the collections of materials we have inherited from the past, and for incorporating in these collections the findings of linguists and other scholars concerned with language. Besides illustrating how such modifications have been carried out in a severely limited lexicographical project, I will comment on findings of linguistics which should be included in an archive, and eventually incorporated in our dictionaries. Any archive must aim to incorporate all the available lexicographical collections. This aim will involve many practical problems, such as that of copyright. But scholars and companies who have assembled such collections have cooperated generously with students of lexicography; the G. & C. Merriam Company, for example, has permitted the contents of the Webster Collegiate Dictionary to be key-punched and stored, and made available generally, as have the scholars at Brown University their corpus of English text. The proposed archive must obtain all such material, enter it in a format that will permit ready modification as well as compact storage, and make these collections the basis of future lexicographical research. In setting out to accomplish this aimsimply by designing the format of the entries for computer storage-archivists will incorporate more of the findings of linguistics than has yet been done, and their lexicographical data will be increasingly formalized. We may examine