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Renaissance word-meaning

Word-entries in early dictionaries normally explain their headwords by giving equivalents in English, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and other languages, by commenting on their usage, and by contextualizing them in illustrative phrases and sentences. Renaissance words had no fixed lexical definitions in these dictionaries. The very concept of defining words at all might have been strange to Shakespeare's contemporaries. They understood logical definition, which describes what a thing is in the world, but (to judge from what these dictionaries say about words such as "definition," "sense," and "meaning") did not believe that words shared the definability of things. Words were commonly regarded as signs or pointers denoting or, in common parlance, naming things. Dictionaries tended to explain words either by giving other signs corresponding to them, whether in English (synonyms) or in another language (translations), or by describing the realia they pointed to. Consequently Florio's Italian-English World of wordes, Cotgrave's French-English dictionary and Blount'sGlossographia read like encyclopedias, guides to the world.

Meaning in modern dictionaries relies on formulaic, referential, and synonym definitions. The first, formulaic, employs morphologically derived forms (e.g., "possession is the fact of being possessed"). The second, referential, uses distinctive `fixed' senses that are abstracted from cited quotations. These senses give "the general class (category) and ... those relevant (distinctive, criterial) features that differentiate the given referent (`thing, concept being defined') from other members of the same class" (Benson, Benson and Ilson 1986: 204). Referential definitions are logical definitions that have been transformed and shifted from the thing to the sign that points to the thing. The structure of a referential definition, however, is far from the plain, sometimes wordy explanation used in the Renaissance. It now reflects scientific methods for fixing unambiguously the exact characteristics of living things, and their place in the hierarchy of the plant and animal kingdom.

Most English Renaissance speakers and writers, however, seem not to have recognized meaning as fixed senses, an aspect of language that we have taken for granted since Samuel Johnson. Meaning was fuzzy and indeterminate. Instead, until the late 17th century, English dictionaries were normally "bilingual," either in mapping a non-English language to English (that is, translation) or in mapping hard, often Latinate English, so-called "ink-horn" terms, to easier common English (a function of synonyms). As a result of these mappings, meaning ("definition") in practice was described in terms of lexical equivalence. I presented this tentative research finding at the CCHWP4 conference in Toronto on October 8-9, 1993, sponsored by SSHRC. Richard Bailey also sees lexical indeterminacy as a general linguistic phenomenon, not limited to the early period: "Rigid sense divisions typical of dictionaries fail to capture the synchronic fact of variation that is present in every living language community" (1980: 212). Early dictionaries display a sensitivity to the imprecision of words that many of our lexicons today try to expunge from the language.

Some few examples from the terminology will illustrate this viewpoint. Elyot (1538) says: "Definitio, definitionis, a definition, whyche expresseth in fewe wordes, what it is that is spoken of, as, Homo est animal, rationale, mortale, A man is a thyng lyuely, resonable, and mortalle" (i.e. "definition" translates or provides equivalent expressions). Thomas Thomas (1587) says of the same word: "A definition, which in fewe wordes expresseth what it is that is spoken of: a declaring or specifying" (i.e. "definition" describes the thing spoken of, not the word). Edward Phillips (1658) says: "Definition, (lat.) an explication or unfolding of the essence of a thing by its genus and difference" (a clear reference to a logical definition). Cotgrave (1611) describes the words "Calepiner" and "Interpreter" respectively: "To interprete, or translate, exactly, or word by word," and "To interpret, expound; translate, shew the meaning, tell the signification, of" (note here that translating and showing meaning fall inside a section bounded by a semi-colon, as if they were synonyms).

This theory holds that Renaissance speakers assumed that words themselves did not reflect the complexity of things but only, so to speak, pointed to or betokened those things and "cast only the shadows" of that complexity. The theory predicts that Renaissance word usage has many fewer constraints. Lexical indeterminacy observed in the period (the frequent inability of modern lexicographers to detect precise senses, and their omission of citations of that kind in their examples) is consistent with this theory. Other features of Renaissance English also fit well with it:

• the rapid influx of vocabulary from non-English languages,
• the failure of dictionaries to employ lemmas as headwords (for example, Palsgrave listed verbs alphabetically by the first-person singular form inside a sentence that often started with another word),
• the "definition" of foreign words in bilingual dictionaries by lists of English synonyms, and especially
• the failure of early English-only dictionaries to explain common English words.

If dictionaries (and their users) believed that words had referential definitions, then they would be needed for all words, even (I would say especially) for the most common. Yet the structures used for an early dictionary entry do not separate the post-lemmatic explanatory part into what we would call "fixed senses." Where we expect definitions, we find inside illustrative sentences, idiomatic phrases, proverbs, and chatty remarks about history and society. In entries, semi-colons and "also" (i.e. dictionary metalanguage) do not section the explanation into units that look like fixed senses.

If these findings turn out to be true, interpretation of early writings (Renaissance as well as medieval) will clearly hinge on an understanding--not of the words as intellectual constructs--but on the now-lost world to which those words pointed. To analyze language as a closed system will be shown to be fundamentally anachronistic. Not only is poetry a "picture" of the world it describes, but all writings are.