Johnson and language

Book section : Chapter

This chapter interrogates critical commonplaces about Johnson’s use of and approaches to language, engaging both with lexicography and the making of Johnson’s celebrated Dictionary (1st ed., 1755), alongside his thinking on language more widely. Johnson’s interest in empiricism and data collection, alongside his deployment of metaphors of slavery and contested power, shed light on his lexicographical method, as does his innovative decision to include letters and letter-writing as a productive source of information, especially of “ordinary” use. His engagement with register and contextual use, with the intricacies of connotation alongside denotation, and with loanwords (and their influence on processes of change and assimilation) document an approach dominated not by rigidity and stasis but by a wide-ranging commitment to a language that, then and now, was marked by its “exuberance of signification.”

Authors: Mugglestone, L

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Host title: The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson
• Pages: 55-68
• Chapter number: 4
• Series: Cambridge Companions to Literature
• Place of publication: Cambridge
• Publication date: 2022-09-22
• Edition: 1
• DOI: 10.1017/9781108966108.005
• EISBN: 9781108965781
• ISBN: 9781108832823
• Language: English
• Keywords: prescriptivism; standardization; letters and letter-writing; loanwords; descriptivism; lexicography; empiricism; slavery as metaphor; register and meaning; English dictionary
• Subtype: Chapter