Macrostructure of Encyclopaedic and Linguistic Dictionaries: Common and Specific Features

Abstract

This paper presents a study of encyclopaedic and linguistic dictionaries with relation to their structural components. It investigates the macrostructure features of both types of lexicographic works. Results show that, in spite of common approaches to macrostructure construction, encyclopaedic dictionaries are limited in the selection of headwords and register nouns, noun phrases and proper names mainly, whereas linguistic dictionaries try to represent the whole lexicon of the language. Also, polysemanticism and homonymy of natural language influence on the arrangement of headwords in dictionary macrostructure.