The morphological status of adverbs ending in -mente in Spanish (-ly in English) has been the object of many studies and continues to be the subject of debate. The two main proposals regarding the morphology of these adverbs treat them as either compounds or derivatives as the result of suffixation, but both hypotheses present problems. In this study an analysis will be defended which treats -mente as a phrasal affix (cf. Zwicky 1987, Nevis 1985 and Miller 1992. The notion of phrasal affix has been used to describe clitics which, from a morphological standpoint, are similar to affixes but which, simultaneously manifest characteristics of independent words. The argument for analyzing -mente as a phrasal affix is based on both synchronic and diachronic data, including some similarities with object clitic pronouns.

This paper looks at how Spanish -mente adverbs are shown in DAELE, an electronic dictionary for advanced-level students of Spanish, currently being developed at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). Since a learners' dictionary is a tool conceived not only for decoding but also for production, information about use is deemed highly relevant in this dictionary. That is why new ways to provide adverb-production information are explored. Our discussion considers aspects of both the macrostructure and the microstructure. In terms of the macrostructure, the main problem arising from the lexicographical representation of adverbs ending in -mente is to decide which adverbs are to be included in the dictionary. In the Spanish lexicographical tradition there are several answers to this question, which range from including only a few adverbs to including all documented adverbs. In terms of the microstructure, it is important to provide all the semantic, morphosyntactic and pragmatic information on how to use an adverb, by means of a set of definition formulae which are both user friendly and informative.

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The digital turn in lexicography has paved the way to new techniques for presenting information in dictionaries. This paper explores the potential of collocational networks (Phillips 1983, Williams 1998) as key lexicographical tools to represent information about lexical combinatorics. Collocational networks, which had initially been used as a means of identifying collocations in large corpora, must now be rethought in order to assist non-expert dictionary users in text production by allowing them to find the exact collocates they are looking for, as well as by offering the grammatical information needed to use collocations accurately. We advocate improving networks by incorporating information visualization techniques (Ware 2008, Pham 2012). Specifically, we suggest a number of measures which may be taken to both simplify access to the information provided by raw output from corpora —much of which may be noise for the dictionary user— and to enrich such collocational data by means of visually-explained relevant grammatical information.