The complications of usage in general dictionaries and the complications of dictionaries in specialized dictionaries of usage. Superficially, usage refers to “good usage” or correctness judgments about language variation, like lie vs. lay, and general dictionaries have tried to signal such judgments for some words. Yet usage also refers to “actual usage,” “contextual usage,” and “traditional usage,” which are all bound up with the simpler notion of “good usage.” The first part of this chapter elaborates these types of usage, the relationships among them, and the ways general dictionaries have incorporated all four types. The second part focuses on specialized dictionaries that focus exclusively on usage issues in all four senses. Such dictionaries vary widely in their macro-structures and micro-structures, and the chapter provides a framework for discerning elements within the entries. Dictionaries of usage are usually better than general dictionaries in giving detailed explanations and treating more issues and more kinds of issues. They do not seem to have improved on general dictionaries for identifying the most important usage issues to be aware of.

Documents attitudes of makers and users toward dictionaries and analyzes attitudes of makers and users and the sometime tension between what users expect and makers provide. Dictionaries evoke strong feelings – often of respect, even reverence, sometimes of disrespect and outrage; they play an outsized role in people’s lives because of the profoundly intimate link between a lexicon and the culture and values of the society whose lexicon it is. A dictionary is viewed by speakers of the enregistered language as a mirror reflecting their culture, and by outsiders as a window into the culture. Creation of a dictionary is itself a kind of enactment – viewed, especially by speakers whose language has not been regarded as real or equal, as recognizing their language. A few nations have instituted academies to patrol their language, in part by crafting dictionaries. Dictionary makers’ attitudes are expressed in the frontmatter and, more reliably, in the entries and contents. In recent decades, users have addressed makers directly, insisting that dictionaries speak not only to their lexical needs but that they accurately mirror their social, political, and ethical values.

Copyeditors and proofreaders are some of the heaviest users of dictionaries, consulting them regularly in the course of their work, though little has been written on the influence of dictionaries on editors or of editors on dictionaries. Editors consult dictionaries on matters of spelling, capitalization, compounding, meaning, end-of-line hyphenation, and more. They may also disallow new forms or senses not found in a dictionary. Further, style manuals typically dictate not only which dictionary to use but how to use it, particularly on matters of spelling variants. Dictionaries thus become prescriptive tools in the hands of editors, despite lexicographers’ descriptive approach. There may also be something of a feedback loop between editors and lexicographers: because editors are gatekeepers of publishing, they have an outsized influence on what appears in print and thus what is recorded in dictionaries and therefore regarded as correct. Through dictionaries, copyeditors may therefore play an underappreciated and largely unexplored role in shaping standard English.

This chapter provides details of the different kinds of vaccines available (live, attenuated, killed, inactivated, recombinant, subunit, mRNA, DNA and vector) for virus infections (e.g. SARS-CoV-2, HAV, HBV, influenzaviruses, JEE, measlesvirus, mumpsvirus, rubellavirus, HPV, rabies, polio, rotavirus, smallpox, mpox, yellow fever virus) in humans. It details the routes of administration and usage (e.g. pre-exposure or post-exposure, childhood, occupational health, travel and for at-risk groups).

This chapter provides details of serological tests which can be used to detect viral antibodies or antigens in serum, saliva or urine (e.g. ELISA, EIA, IF, CFT, HAI, neutralisation, Western blot, line immunoassays and avidity tests). It details the utility of each test.

This chapter addresses Heidegger’s understanding of the relation between philosophy and poetry, inasmuch as each mode of saying has its source in language. Heidegger’s use of poetry has been the object of considerable critical scrutiny; he has frequently been accused of forms of misuse. However, any assessment of what Heidegger understands himself to be doing with the poetic text requires a grasp of his understanding of the notion of use itself (and with this the notion of relation). From this perspective, we have a more founded approach to Heidegger’s manner of thinking with and by way of poetry.

Informal borrowings are used for several reasons. They are used to name things, providing alternative synonyms for things already named in English but also names for things yet to be named. More often, however, they are used instead of standard English to communicate additional information that is social, psychological, rhetorical, or cultural in nature. The social function involves group solidarity and social distancing. The psychological function includes expression of emotions via a repertoire of expressions for a variety of emotional states and emotive labels. The rhetorical function includes informality, conciseness, forcefulness, wordplay, and small talk. The cultural function involves expressing cultural identity and stylization; while expressing cultural identity is often the reason for using such expressions, stylization is another phenomenon accounting for their common use among larger segments of American society.

Basque possesses a large, distinctive class of iconic elements known as ideophones (onomatopoeia in traditional terms). This chapter succinctly describes the main typological characteristics of these words, and argues that, due to their prominent status in Basque and in linguistic typology in general, they should be considered one of the main typological traits of Basque, alongside other linguistic features specific to this language such as ergativity, case alignment, and double marking.

The interest in early Latin developed mainly outside the field of normative grammar, particularly in authors who belonged to the tradition of scholarly or antiquarian writing. Varro’s encyclopaedic works testify to a unique effort to save uestigia of the cultural and historical past by means of linguistic operations. His approach soon lost its institutional character and was replaced by curiosity for rare minutiae, as in Pliny’s Dubius Sermo. Grammarians like Probus and Caper, whose orientation was philological rather than didactic, considered that the auctoritas of literary models made divergences from the norm or contemporary usage acceptable, and viewed uetustas as the area of experimental variation, both lexical and morphological, with respect to the usage of Republican writers. The inclusion of an immense corpus of literary quotations in comprehensive works (artes grammaticae) facilitated the adoption of an overall perspective that embraced the evolution of the linguistic system at all levels, and kept alive an awareness of the diachronic dimension of the language, which became increasingly profound in scholars like Priscian who read Terence in sixth-century Constantinople.

This chapter introduces clichés and discusses their uses and contemporary debates in academic and public domains. It argues for a functional approach to the study of clichés and outlines the scope of the book.

Chapter 5 compares the phraseology of usage to exposure. It shows that more than half of patterns extracted from a student’s usage corpus also occur in her exposure corpus. At the same time the figure drops significantly if these patterns are compared to a different student’s exposure corpus supporting the assumption of representativeness. The chapter then proceeds to compare usage patterns to exposure qualitatively focusing on the processes of variation and change. It finds support for the process of approximation through which a more or less fixed pattern loosens and becomes variable on the semantic or grammatical axis presumably due to frequency effects and the properties of human memory. The chapter also proposes a reverse process, fixing, through which the pattern extends and develops verbatim associations through repeated usage. Both processes are suggested to occur within meaning-shifts units and thus be characteristic of co-selection.

Chapter 4 argues for the benefits of an intra-individual research design and collecting different types of data from the same individuals. It shows that there is a developing interest towards an individual rather than commonalities across individuals in psychology, brain research and linguistics and discusses the differences between the individual and the communal level of language representation drawing on the usage-based perspective and complex systems. It then proposes a corpus of Master’s thesis drafts as a usage corpus, a personal corpus of references cited in the thesis as an exposure corpus and word associations as complementing psycholinguistic data. Given a long history of the word association method which was not always successful, the chapter also provides an extended discussion of its specifics. At the end, the chapter describes the corpus linguistic operationalization of meaning-shift units adopted in this study and data triangulation procedures.