A History of Roget's Thesaurus
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Roget's Thesaurus was first published in 1852 and has come to be one of the most famous and widely-used reference works in the world. This is the first account of its genesis. Werner Hullen contends that synonymy (words with similar meanings) is a feature of language without which we could not communicate. He describes the development in the theory and practice of synonymy from Plato to the seventeenth century, when the first English synonym dictionaries began to appear. Roget's Thesaurus, the first synonym dictionary arranged in topical order, represents an enormously significant peak in this development. This book exposes the conceptual framework behind the Thesaurus and shows how it can be interpreted as a predecessor of linguistic semantics.Features
- 2002 saw the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first incarnation of Roget's Thesaurus
- Authoritative scholarly account of a major work in the English language
- Contains introductory material useful to undergraduate students of lexicography
About the Author(s)
Werner Hullen is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. He has published widely on the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language. His most recent interest is the history of linguistics, particularly lexicography. On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Professor Hullen was awarded a two-volume Festschrift, Perspectives on Language in Performance, edited by Wolfgang Lorscher and Rainer Schulze, (Tubingen 1987). On the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, the members of the Oxford based Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas, whose president he was between 1992 and 2002, honoured him with a reprint of Collected Papers on the History of Linguistic Ideas, edited by Michael M. Isermann (Munster 2002).
