All pronunciation dictionaries make use of abbreviatory conventions to save space. Devices such as italicization, superscription, and parenthesization make it possible to cater for several different phonetic forms without retranscribing the whole of the variant pronunciation. The three currently available pronunciation dictionaries of English are EPD, LPD and ODP. They all exploit the possibili...

This paper investigates a puzzling feature of social conventions: the fact that they are both arbitrary and normative. We examine how this tension is addressed in sociological accounts of conventional phenomena. Traditional approaches tend to generate either synchronic accounts that fail to consider the arbitrariness of conventions, or diachronic accounts that miss central aspects of their norm...