The Treatment of Polymorphism in General Monolingual Dictionaries of Semasiological Orientation

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the treatment given to polymorphism in entries of nouns in General monolingual dictionaries of semasiological orientation of the Hispanic lexicographical tradition. The goal of this research is to evaluate this issue in these works not only in relation to the presence, arrangement and location of the information, but also as regards the criteria used to establish the “type” and “token” items. For this analysis, the postulates of Porto Dapena, Hausmann and Wiegand were used as theoretical framework, although not exclusively. The results indicate that the analyzed dictionaries arenot based on a microstructural information program (PCI, in Portuguese) to treat and strategically organize the information relating to spelling variants.This, necessarily, ends up compromising the quality of many segments of the lexicographical microstructure, which may turn out to provide little or no functional information to potential users.

Keywords

• lexicography
• General monolingual semasiological dictionaries
• microstructure
• polymorphism