The lexicographical approach to remittere in the Thesaurus linguae Latinae (compared with dimittere and mittere)

Abstract

Abstract One problem of all existing Latin dictionaries is that the text corpus was too limited to give a comprehensive semantic picture of a lemma. In the Thesaurus linguae Latinae (TLL) the database is much more extensive: the corpus of the TLL consists of all surviving texts up to ca. 600 CE. For the time up to ca. 200 CE all evidence is taken into account, for the time after that a selection. Here, using the recently written article remitto, it is shown how an article is constructed and what the criteria of the groups are. Thus, this paper gives guidance on how to interpret a TLL article. It also compares remitto, published in 2021, with the simplex mitto, published in 1957, and with dimitto, published in 1913. It turns out that the lemma remittere has three main groups that correspond exactly to the three main groups of mittere: ‘send’, ‘throw’ and ‘let go’. The criteria of these three main groups can be described as follows: ‘command or cause a movement’ (‘send’), ‘perform a movement action’ (‘throw’) and ‘allow a movement’ (‘let go’). In remittere we accordingly find: ‘to send back’, ‘to throw back’, and ‘to let go (back)’. This last meaning is the largest and overlaps with dimittere. However, remittere can also mean ‘to relax’, which we do not see in the earlier article dimitto.