Pragmatics, lexicography and dictionaries of English

Abstract

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 pragmatics 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.