Pragmatics, lexicography and dictionaries of English

Abstract

This paper treats the influence of pragmatics on lexicography, with illustrations from several dictionaries of English as well as from other mono-and bilingual dictionaries. In Section 2, the history of the term prugmutics is discussed, and the emergence of pragmatics as a discipline is described as having origins in transformational grammar and in the study of speech acts. Section 3 contains a general discussion of more and less common pragmatic aspects of the dictionary, such as indexicality (deixis). Section 4 focuses on three pragmatic aspects of dictionaries: the cultural setting, equivalence in bilingual dictionaries with English, and the lexicographic definition. It is shown that the cultural setting can influence the choice of pictorial illustrations or of words to be included in the dictionary. Equivalence is a lexicographic problem due to the lack of one-to-one meaning correspondences between words in different languages; finding appropriate translational equivalents is a difficult task for makers of bilingual dictionaries, since they often face situations in which only a partial equivalence exists between words or in which there is no equivalent for a given word due to cultural and other differences between languages. The lexicographic definition, or explanation of meaning, presents three difficulties to lexicographers: circularity, explaining obscurum per obscurius, and hyperonymic regression. The Collins COBUILD is given as example of a monolingual English dictionary that avoids the problems of explanation of meaning in an original way. This paper concludes with observations on how pragmatic competence, as one part of linguistic competence, must be used in the interpretation of dictionary definitions, especially of the type of Collins COBUILD: a comparison is made between dictionaries that rely heavily on human pragmatic knowledge, and those constructed for computational use that must make their pragmatic component explicit

DanNet: the challenge of compiling a wordnet for Danish by reusing a monolingual dictionary

“…Dictionaries rely heavily on human pragmatic knowledge and the language-user's ability to make assumptions without any explicit statements in the text (Svensén 1993: 133;Zgusta 1988). This implies that not all the information needed in wordnets can be extracted from a dictionary.…”

The Use of Pictorial Illustrations in African Language Dictionaries

“…Zgusta 1971, Carstens 2001. Zgusta (1988) states that, since the dictionary is a text couched in natural language, it possesses pragmatic aspects itself. In this article, the role of illustrations in conveying cultural information in monolingual and bi-or multi-lingual dictionaries is dealt with.…”

Bilingual English-Persian Dictionaries from a Pragmatic Perspective: Labeling in Focus

“…When it comes to bilingual dictionaries this integration is regarded even more crucial because of the important role they play in intercultural production and comprehension. Nowadays, no doubt, one of the principles of lexicography is making use of restrictive labels to show register and stylistic peculiarities of the words (Gove, 1967;Kipfer, 1984;Zgusta, 1988 Headword → pronunciation (IPA) → word classes → stylistic and register labels → translation equivalents, which may be preceded or followed by semantic, cultural and pragmatic glosses → SL examples, with TL translation → (etymologies: distant or immediate sources)…”

“…Now the question is how to integrate the achievements of pragmatics into the task of lexicography. Zgusta (1988) enumerates three aspects of representing pragmatics in the existing reference works as (a) cultural setting in dictionaries; (b) equivalence in bilingual dictionaries; (c) definitions in monolingual dictionaries. Apresyan (1988 in Burkhanov, 2003) believes that pragmatic representations in lexicography reflect the speaker"s attitude to reality, the message and the interlocutor.…”