Inclusion, Contrast and Polysemy in Dictionaries: The Relationship between Theory, Language Use and Lexicographic Practice

Anu Koskela

doi:10.1515/rela-2015-0001

Authors

Anu Koskela De Montfort University, Leicester

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1515/rela-2015-0001

Keywords:

semantics, lexicology, lexicography, polysemy

Abstract

This paper explores the lexicographic representation of a type of polysemy that arises when the meaning of one lexical item can either include or contrast with the meaning of another, as in the case of dog/bitch, shoe/boot, finger/thumb and animal/bird. A survey of how such pairs are represented in monolingual English dictionaries showed that dictionaries mostly represent as explicitly polysemous those lexical items whose broader and narrower readings are more distinctive and clearly separable in definitional terms. They commonly only represented the broader readings for terms that are in fact frequently used in the narrower reading, as shown by data from the British National Corpus.

Author Biography

Anu Koskela, De Montfort University, Leicester

Anu Koskela received her Doctorate in Linguistics from the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, and currently works as a Lecturer in English Language at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. Her research is focused on lexical semantics and cognitive linguistics, particularly on polysemy, categorisation, meaning relations and metonymy. She is the co-author (with M. Lynne Murphy) of Key Terms in Semantics (2010, Continuum).

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