Pragmatics in learners' dictionaries

Abstract

The role of pragmatic factors as key elements in communication has not been underestimated by the authors of Learners' Dictionaries, which aim to help foreign students to use English not only correctly, but also effectively and appropriately. Thus information about those factors, mainly connected with extra-linguistic features such as the context of situation and connotative, culture-specific values, has been included in Learners' Dictionaries, either explicitly explained in Notes, charts, etc. and coded in stylistic and register labels, or implicity conveyed in definitions and examples. A few examples of both explicit and implicit information, such as on the one hand the contents of certain Notes, and, on the other, the deictic use of proforms and the role of sexism, will be analyzed in this paper in section 2 and in section 3 respectively, to see how effectively and consistently pragmatic factors are dealt with in three major Learners' Dictionaries, the Oxford Advanced Learners' Dictionary, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary. It seems that, as already suggested by Zgusta (1988), the decodification of the pragmatic information given ultimately relies on the pragmatic, rather than on the linguistic, competence of the dictionary user.