ABSTRACT
The lexical personality paradigm considers personality-descriptive terms listed in dictionaries to be the main database for research on the Big Five taxomony. The rationale for using the dictionary as the definitive database is that lexical researchers believe the importance of a trait to be proportional to the number of terms in a language used to encode it (Goldberg, 1981). Most language speakers obviously use only a small subset of the traits listed in the dictionary, however. Therefore, we tend to agree with Pervin’s (1994) criticism of the lexical approach in which he claimed that trait adjectives as a category were not sufficient to capture all the meaning of our persondescriptive language.
