Maria Cristina
Università di Verona

Free electronic dictionaries as well as online versions of official dictionaries provide an easy-access, user-friendly lexical source available for immediate use. In addition to this, they cover a multi-scope range of functions from trivial language support tools (e.g. online phonetics resources, meaning retrieval, word simple translation in main languages ) to more sophisticated uses (i.e. hypertextual semantic expansion) that may eventually add heuristic value to the search. As a matter of fact, online dictionaries represent the most widely used form of lexical reference source.

One of the typical features of dictionaries in web forms is the restricted number of lexical entries and the limited availability of definitions compared to the official paper versions. This entails imposed selections at both semantic and lexical levels which intertextual expansions provided only by nodes in the hypertextual modality can sometimes partially replace.

Clearly, such text-type constraints hide ideological significance expressed in value systems and associated assumptions at lexicographic level.

The ideological work of language is a form of hegemony implemented through the universalization of particular meanings in the service of achieving and maintaining dominance.

Referring to Fairclough (2003), I will draw from the notions of ‘logical implications’ and ‘assumed meanings’: the former are implicit meanings which can be logically inferred from features of language (presuppositions on what is assumed to be known or believed); the latter are non-standard implicatures about the strategic avoidance of explicitness.

This paper intends to investigate the ideological use of implicatures and assumptions underlying online dictionary prescriptivism (i.e. lexical and semantic). Moreover, the meaning-relations implicitly represented in the lexical chains as resulting from the application of a selection paradigm (foregrounding/backgrounding) will be considered. In this phase, the focus of attention will also be addressed to the analysis of the relation between lexical meanings and usage definitions. Finally, the conceptual blending theory will be used as fundamental analytical tool for the retrieving of ideological meanings implied in the selection of related NPs. Thus forms of semantic compositionality emerging from the blending will be discussed as the output of pervasive enacted ideologies.

References:

• Fairclough, Norman 2003. Analysing Discourse. London: Routledge.