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RR 2004/87 International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2nd edition) Editor-in-Chief William J. Frawley Oxford University Press Oxford 2003 4 vols ISBN 0 19513977 1 £300/US$495
Keywords Encyclopaedias, Linguistics, Languages
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120410521060
In his introduction to the first edition of the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (IEL), in 1992, the then editor-in-chief, William Bright, stated that it was designed "to provide a comprehensive source of up-to-date information on all branches of linguistics, aimed primarily at an audience of students and professional scholars in linguistics and adjacent fields". This introduction is reprinted (Vol. 1, pp. xvii-xx) in the new edition, as an essential guide to the structure, motivation and methodology of the work as originally conceived and as substantially maintained by Bright's successor William J. Frawley a decade later. Frawley, in his own introduction (pp. xi-xv), charts at length the divergences between IEL's first and second editions. Briefly, the second edition contains 957 articles and about half as many more headwords and subheadwords. All the articles from the first edition are updated in some way, with most ranging from 40 per...