Mariusz Piotr Kamiński. Defining with Simple Vocabulary in English Dictionaries.

[摘要] This book must be the most thorough and comprehensive up-to-date accountof restricted vocabularies of the English language. In the Introduction, theauthor formulates six research questions, which partly aim at the design of different restricted vocabularies, and, partly focus on the effectiveness of definitions based on restricted vocabularies. Chapter 1 traces the development ofrestricted vocabularies back to the 17th century and outlines important stagessuch as Isaac Pitman's and Kaeding's shorthand systems. The author thenmakes a distinction between (a) the frequency-based objective approach takenby scholars such as Thorndike and Horn, (b) a more pedagogically orientedapproach associated with Harold Palmer and Michael West, and (c) a logicalapproach attributed to Ogden and Richards, and discusses the pros and cons ofeach of them. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to a very detailed outlineand critical discussion of Michael West's famous and influential General ServiceList. He comes back to the GSL after outlining a number of word list projectsthat were designed for pedagogical purposes in Chapter 2, which also dealswith human-computer communication projects and Wierzbicka's theory of asemantic metalanguage.

[学科分类] 化学工程（综合）