Dictionarization and Lexical Variation in Dictionaries of Spanish Neologisms

Abstract

Dictionaries of neologisms are quite complex to characterize; furthermore, there is little discussion on this issue in the literature and hardly any theoretical reflection on it. In this paper we claim that the specific nature of this kind of dictionaries lies, in part, in the peculiar character of the concept of neologism itself, and in part in the problems involved in lexicographic typologization in general, and of dictionaries of pluricentric languages in particular. We describe dictionaries of neologisms from three points of view: as ‘transition’ devices, ‘remedial’ devices, and documents. The aim of this article is to show how Spanish dialectal variation is represented in dictionaries of neologisms that were published since 2008. The main focus of our analysis is the Antenario. Diccionario en línea de neologismos de las variedades del español (http://www.antenario.wordpress.com), designed and written by the Antenas Neológicas Network (https://www.upf.edu/web/antenas). Our discussion is focused on how the pluricentric nature of Spanish impacts on the representation of varieties in the Antenario, which to date is the only dictionary that explicitly sets out to capture this phenomenon. We consider two of the structures of the dictionary: the macrostructure or headword list and the microstructure or structure of the entry.