Seminar: Chasing meaning through the comparison of uses of keywords (D. Block)
Channel: Grup de recerca InfoLex
Date: 2022-05-18

Full title: "Chasing meaning through the comparison and contrast of theoretical and day-to-day uses of keywords: Lexicography by other means?"

Consulting the INFOLEX webpage, I see that the group’s main activity is ‘the study of the lexicon as the object of dictionaries, both monolingual and bilingual, and the information that dictionaries contain’. Working across four languages (Catalan, Spanish, French and English), with an interest in both description and real-world applications, group members aim to develop ‘detailed and precise descriptions of semantic, morphological and syntactic aspects that receive attention in dictionaries’ on the way to improving the practice of lexicography. I am not a lexicographer, although I am someone who in recent years has devoted a fair amount of attention and writing to the meanings of keywords used in the social sciences and humanities today, such as social class (Block, 2014), neoliberalism (Block, 2018), commodification (2019) and post-truth (2019). My methodology has certainly not been overly complex, consisting mainly of juxtaposing meanings of keywords derived from theory with meanings emergent in the uses of keywords by fellow academics and lay people – politicians, journalists, friends and family and so on. In this paper, I will conduct a critical examination of my practices, providing examples along the way. I will address the question in the title about my possible status as a lexicographer by other means, but more importantly, I will consider questions I often ask myself about the utility of what I do.