Historical dictionary definitions revisited from a prototype theoretical standpoint

Abstract

Historical dictionaries have not yet incorporated prototype theoretical principles, from which singular enhancements might be obtained in historical lexicography. Revisiting diachronic definitions from a prototypical standpoint underlines how salience-based definitions comply more accurately with the cognitive constraints of the human mind. Upon this realization, the paper presents a template for reorganizing historical definitions according to the principles of prototype theory. The resulting definitions depict the semasiological profile of terms in a more transparent way while stressing the mutual interface between linguistic and extralinguistic data and between synchrony and diachrony. At the same time, the paper shows how the theoretical tenets of cognitive linguistics can be put to use in the field of applied linguistics, viz. lexicography.

Semantic Shift in Middle English: Farming and Trade As Test Cases

“…The reason is that HLs were designed to cover a huge range of lexis (i.e. every word in OED2 ) and provide an organisational skeleton for the semantic fields within the thesaurus – this is very much an intellectual construct based on the subjective ‘world view’ that the HT editors wished to adopt (Kay 2004: 67; Fischer 2004: 55; Molina 2008). Overall, the broader the domains become the greater the number of possible ways to organise them.…”

The Evolution of Etymons Denoting an Inhabited Place in Ukrainian and English

“…We begin the semantic description by analysing the vocabulary definitions of the lexemes selected for the study. The latter includes the interpretation of a dictionary definition, an often underutilised resource (Silva et al, 2016), which is regarded as a common way of representing the meaning of a word (Geeraerts, 2003;Molina, 2008), namely interpretation as a traditional lexicographic description of lexemes in a natural language, which gives a correct picture of the meaning. On the other hand, the definitions of words in the monolingual dic-tionaries describe, first and foremost, the significative layer of their meaning, related not to reality, but to its reflection in the human mind, representing the totality of essential features of objects denoted by lexical units.…”

The Archeology of Emotion Concepts

“…Lexicography, the art and craft of dictionary making, is a potentially powerful tool for psychologists. Dictionaries are a source of accumulated knowledge about the way in which everyday concepts, as apprehended by users, have been condensed throughout history (Molina, 2005, 2008). The senses or readings listed within dictionary definitions include the consensual constituents of an emotion script (such as feelings, antecedents, expressions, action tendencies, etc.)…”