Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.31724/rihjj.46.2.16
Pragmatics and Lexicography: Deixis as a Challenge of Contemporary Lexicography
Virna Karlić
orcid.org/0000-0002-6525-3805
; Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Petra Bago
orcid.org/0000-0002-4994-6417
; Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Abstract
The paper deals with the problem of the lexicographic description of deictic expressions in contemporary monolingual dictionaries of the Croatian language. The term “deixis” refers to a group of language units that indicate elements of situational and/or discourse context in the utterance ̶such as participants, time, and place of the speech event (Lyons 1977). Deictic expressions belong to a group of lexemes that are especially challenging for lexicographers because their full meaning or referent is established or identified only within the specific speech event. For these reasons, the characteristics of deixis are a constant reminder of the fact that natural languages were primarily designed for use in face-to-face interaction, and that a language can only be analyzed to a certain extent without taking into account these facts (Levinson 1983). In this paper, we conduct an analysis of the definitions of meanings and descriptions of the functions of deictic expressions in Croatian lexicography based on selected representative examples of personal, temporal, spatial, discourse, and social deixis. We identify the shortcomings of the selected dictionaries and suggest possible solutions to the identified problems by applying the methods of corpus pragmatics.
Keywords
deixis; pragmatics; corpus pragmatics; lexicography; Croatian language
Hrčak ID:
245467
URI
Publication date:
30.10.2020.
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