A "Question of Questionable Compounds"? Phrasal verbs in OED1

Conference item

Phrasal verbs are notoriously problematic for lexicographers. One difficult decision is whether to define only idiomatic combinations (such as fall out meaning 'disagree') or to define transparent ones as well (such as fall out in a sentence like 'the bird fell out of the tree', where fall and out retain their primary senses). Johnson was the first English lexicographer to address this problem, suggesting in his Preface that transparent combinations need not be defined; but in practice he included many of these (e.g. come in 'enter'). As Osselton (1986: 10) remarks, Johnson was not alone in failing to resolve this problem: 'somewhere between boringly predictable items... and highly idiomatic ones... there is a grey area in which lexicographers have been floundering ever since'.

While there has been some research on Johnson's treatment of phrasal verbs (e.g. Osselton 1986; Landau 2005) and on approaches to phrasal verbs in twentieth-century dictionaries (especially Cowie 1999), very little has been written on the way that phrasal verbs were dealt with in OED1. We know that the OED1 editors had conflicting ideas about other types of compound: Brewer (2007: 21, 182) discusses Murray's objection to Craigie's inclusion of terms like railway director meaning 'director of a railway', and Murray's statement to the Philological Society that 'I have found the question of questionable compounds a very difficult one to settle' (1879, quoted in Brewer 2007: 183). It is of further interest to consider how this problem was approached where phrasal verbs were concerned. The purpose of my paper, then, is to examine the treatment of phrasal verbs within and across volumes of OED1 in order to determine differences and development of editorial methodology in this thorny area of lexicography.

Authors: Wild, K

• Alternative title: Presented at Phraseology session
• Publication status: Not published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Language: English
• Keywords: Oxford English Dictionary
• Subjects: English Language and Literature