Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL

Coordinators and editors:

• Alexandra Gubina (Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim, Germany)
• Chase Wesley Raymond (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA)
• Elliott M. Hoey (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL)

Overview

The Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA/IL is an online resource for students and scholars of CA/IL, publicly available on the EMCA Wiki page. Encyclopedias and glossaries are widespread across various fields and methods, and serve as immensely valuable resources. Given the extent to which the EMCA/IL community has expanded over the years—both terminologically as well as geographically—we hope that this encyclopedia of terminology will be well received by students and practitioners of CA and IL across the globe.

While prototypical ‘glossaries’ usually contain a simple alphabetical list of terms from a particular research area, and provide readers with short definitions of these terms (e.g., The SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms <https://glossary.sil.org/>), ‘encyclopedias’ contain a summary, or a theoretical overview of specific concepts, or topics from a particular research field, or discipline (see, e.g., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <https://plato.stanford.edu/>). Our Encyclopedia is in fact a bit of a hybrid between these two formats. On the one hand, there are entries on terms/phenomena/notions that are clearly and simply defined (e.g., ‘micropause’); such entries typically contain a quite short definition/description of the term, and a short extract to illustrate the phenomenon. On the other hand, however, there are various other terms/phenomena/concepts that are much more complicated to explicate. This may be due to the intrinsic complexity or multidimensionality of the specific term in question, and/or due to there being a wide range of relevant lines of research to highlight (e.g., ‘request’), in which case more of a presentation of the ‘state of the art’ is relevant. On this point, it is being made clear to authors that they should aim for ‘neutrality’ in their overviews: If some scholars use a term to mean one thing, but others use it in a slightly different sense, both of these senses (and their citations) should be included in the entry without the author taking a stance on who is ‘right’ (e.g., ‘assessment’).

An important feature of the online nature of the Encyclopedia is the interlinking between entries for different terms. So the entry for ‘request’ will have embedded links to other relevant terms (e.g., ‘recruitment’, ‘action’, ‘entitlement’, etc.). In addition, entries will provide quick links to bibliographic references (easily linked with the EMCA wiki). Lastly, we note that the online format provides for the addition of additional entries over time. This allows for the contents of individual entries to be updateable over time, but as entries are peer-reviewed before posting, they are finalized by the time they go live as PDFs with associated DOIs, with any substantial revisions (on the wiki) integrated into that 'canonical' version at the point of a ‘second edition’ of the Encyclopedia being issued.

It is crucial to clarify that, with this project, we do not mean to present CA/IL as an overly terminological enterprise. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: We don’t want CA/IL’s terminology to be a barrier to students’ and researchers’ participation in the field. The aim here is to be more open and transparent about the terminology we use, and why we use it, and to provide a place where such information can be easily located. Moreover, the entries are indeed summaries, and as such they should serve as a starting-off point for further exploration, navigation of relevant literature, developing of research questions, etc. We hope this resource will be useful for both novices (especially for those who do not have systematic CA training) and advanced practitioners alike.