This chapter traces the development of monolingual learners’ dictionaries (MLD) from their genesis in the 1930s through their current internet editions. Starting from the pioneering work of West, Palmer, and Hornby, it shows how the aim of enabling learners to read and write English effectively informed the developing content of MLDs, from the Oxford Advanced Learner’s through the Longman, Collins, Cambridge, Macmillan, and American Merriam-Webster dictionaries. The introduction of explicit information on grammatical and lexical patterning including collocations and idioms, the use of a limited defining vocabulary, the use of a computer corpus of texts, and the inclusion of frequency information all contributed to the profile of the MLD as it is known today. Increasing concern for accessibility has influenced both the layout of dictionary entries and the presentation of word senses in longer entries, with the use of guide words and menus. The chapter ends with a brief review of the benefits and challenges of migrating MLDs to the electronic medium, especially the Internet.

This chapter considers the appearance of the first monolingual dictionary of English at the beginning of the seventeenth century and its forebears in the late sixteenth century. Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall, a so-called ‘hard words’ dictionary, was first published in 1604, and was preceded by a list published as an addendum to the main predecessor, Edmund Coote’s The English Schoole-Maister of 1596. Cawdrey’s work was addressed to a clientele which was literate but less than fully educated, and in particular, women who were sufficiently educated to teach others, especially in their own households, and to promulgate a religious agenda. Coote’s book was essentially a teaching manual aimed not merely at students, but at the teachers themselves, and was based on a clearly articulated method. These two dictionaries have a close relationship, Cawdrey employing a large percentage of Coote’s entries. This chapter explores that relationship in detail. While many entries are taken over largely unaltered, there are also numerous changes, including expansions, the provision of explanatory material, and new definitions. There are also many deletions from Coote, and the incorporation of terms from other works.

Allusions to and citations of Richard Wagner abound in popular culture, but allusions to the Ring cycle are uniquely fraught. They assume some familiarity with a monumental work that resists easy pop cultural grinding up. This chapter traces different strategies employed by writers, performers, directors, and film composers to engage, whether humorously or seriously, with a work that is as difficult to cite as it is tempting to make grist for the pop-cultural mill.

My first encounter with what has come to be known as minimalist music was at a rehearsal of Steve Reich’s iconic composition, Drumming, in his downtown New York City loft in the early spring of 1971. Reich was still composing the piece and was teaching it to the assembled musicians by rote. Two pianists, a woodwind player, and Reich – the only one of the four with percussion training – were playing on a line of eight stand-mounted bongo drums and striking them with wooden timbale sticks. Normally, drummers play on one pair of tightly tuned bongos with their hands and they hold the drums between their knees, so I was surprised to see four pairs of bongos, tuned to precise pitches, being played in this manner. However, my surprise turned to curiosity, and even a touch of bewilderment, when I watched and heard what they were playing on these drums.

This chapter discusses the current role of natural language processing in lexicography, and considers how this might change in the future. It first considers the shared history of natural language processing and lexicography with respect to statistical methods. It then discusses how natural language processing is applied to pre-process corpora to support lexicographic analysis, identify collocations in corpora, automatically construct thesauri, and select good dictionary examples. It also discusses the natural language processing tasks of word sense disambiguation and induction and their relationship to lexicography, and very recent neural network-based methods for automatically generating definitions. It concludes by discussing specialised types of dictionaries that can currently be automatically constructed, and considers whether dictionary construction could ever be fully automated.

As long as the human race keeps going, there can be no end to rhythm: we will always need to place events in musical time. It is unlikely that a drone music monoculture will hold static sway for future millennia or take over all perpetuity; humanity’s hyperactive search for meaning needs more reactionary pacing and diversity. Yet while there should be no dispute that there is a future for rhythm, the contents of that future are inevitably impossible to predict, this being the only accurate prediction in the field of futurology. The present chapter will attempt to extrapolate a few current trends and anticipate interesting and, it is hoped, inspiring scenarios but acknowledges the dangers of dropping a crystal ball on our dancing feet. I proceed by considering the space of possible rhythms, the limits of human production of rhythm, the transformation of rhythm through technological means, and the latest repercussions of artificial intelligence technology on rhythmic practice.

The remarkable facility in rhythmic play demonstrated by musicians and dancers throughout the Indian subcontinent is as impressive as it can be bewildering for the listener. From local and regional practices, through devotional and popular genres, to the heavily theorized concert traditions of the North (Hindustani music) and South (Karnatak music), rhythmic complexity abounds. A performance may begin without even a pulse, where melodies seem to float unpredictably in musical space. Yet increasing rhythmic regularity leads to the establishment of repetitive sequences of beats, both evenly and unevenly distributed, which provide the frameworks for elaborate melodic and rhythmic compositions, variations, and improvisations. The entrance of drums – also essentially melodic in their subtle manipulations of pitch, timbre, stress, and resonance – is invariably a moment of great visceral as well as intellectual excitement. Together, singers, dancers, instrumentalists, and drummers build their performances around the anchors provided by the beats; they subdivide these beats in myriad ways, playing with different rhythmic densities and syncopations. The thrilling, rapidly articulated sequences with their offbeat stresses can temporarily disorient the listener until all seems to resolve in a triumphant convergence of surface rhythm and target beat. The rhythmic system as a whole and the individual frameworks of beats that serve to organize rhythmic expression are known as tala.

Early eighteenth-century dictionaries departed from the hard-word tradition to include common words for a wider and expanding audience. Bailey s dictionaries (1721, 1730) provided comprehensive coverage of information of all kinds, not only linguistic, but were found lacking in clarity and lexicographic sophistication. Increasing desire for an authoritative standard for the language prompted Johnson s work on his dictionary of 1755. In this dictionary, he raised the standards of lexicography in regard to definitions (especially multiple ones), phrasal verbs, and other aspects, including the illustration of usage through the use of written authorities; however, he abandoned his hopes and intentions of fixing the language (prescriptivism) in the midst of his work, turning to a more descriptive model of English written usage. The change in method and approach occurred after the failure of his attempts to order literary and other written material he consulted into pre-ordained structures of definition. Concerns for proper speaking and spelling became louder throughout the century, because of the rapidly increasing and increasingly mobile population, as well as the Act of Union of 1707, uniting England and Scotland. Dictionary makers increasingly included guides to pronunciation and spelling in reaction to these concerns, and numerous pronouncing dictionaries appeared from mid-century onwards.

This chapter introduces the reader to the volume and outlines the book’s structure: first, an overview of essential issues pertaining to dictionary style and content; secondly, a fresh narrative of the development of English dictionaries throughout the centuries right up to current-day applications of technology, corpus linguistics, natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence; and thirdly, essays on the regional and global nature of English lexicography and its power to help standardise varieties of English and to define nations seeking independence from the British Empire.

Half a century after Debussy’s famous encounter with Javanese gamelan at the 1889 Paris Exposition, Colin McPhee would decisively catapult the music of neighboring Bali into Western cultural consciousness. Like Debussy before him, the Canadian composer and musicologist saw something novel in the structures, textures, and rhythmic idioms of Balinese gamelan. Its “chief strength,” McPhee argued, “is its rhythm.” He marveled at “highly syncopated passages which … upon analysis resolve themselves like mathematical problems” and admired cyclic rhythmic formulae “as yet undreamed of in our world.” The Balinese musical soundscape, seen through McPhee’s filter, would become source material for a generation of composers from the West, perhaps most notably Benjamin Britten and Steve Reich.

Music and dance are mediums that connect Indigenous communities of North and South America and the social, natural, and cosmic worlds of which they are a part. Despite more than half a millennium of colonization, Indigenous communities sustain Indigenous traditions and practices while simultaneously adapting them to fulfill new communal needs.

One can observe two trends in music theory and analysis in recent decades, partly in response to the criticism of New Musicology in the 1990s: increased attention to the topic of rhythm and meter and increased attention to repertoires of popular music. These two trends have been mutually reinforcing. In the 1980s and 1990s, scholars argued that engaging with popular music would push music scholarship beyond its traditional focus on pitch organization. The impetus for this expansion was popular music’s distinctive rhythms endowed by the influences (or appropriations) of the musics of the African diaspora. These rhythmic features include pervasive anticipatory syncopation, unequal and often maximally even rhythmic groupings, and a tendency toward metric saturation. Given these trends, it would seem that rap music would hold particular interest to music scholars, and indeed, the study of rap music’s sonic organization has also flourished. Yet it still stands somewhat apart, a redux of the relationship of popular music vis-à-vis classical music a generation ago: existing analytic methods (rhythmic or otherwise) are either incompatible with rap music or provide seemingly little illumination. Kyle Adams has documented some ontological reasons for this disconnect: rap music always has a texted component, but the kinds of text-music correspondences analysts find so appealing are scant. Rap music also has an instrumental component (termed “the beat”), but that beat, often with many creators and composed of disparate samples of previous recordings, synthesizers, and programmed drums, would seem not to “work toward a singular expressive purpose.”