ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a discourse analysis of dictionaries as texts produced by an identifiable authority or institution, addressed to a certain public, at a given time and with a specific goal in mind. Despite their claims to the contrary, current lexicographical treatments of Modern Greek cannot be considered to be committed wholly to the strictly scientific lexicographical principles that dictionaries of French, English, German, Italian or Dutch have been following for decades. By comparing the choices that the lexicographers make and by relating them to the character of each dictionary, it proposes a textual analysis of the respective dictionaries as discourses contributing to the ideology of standardization. Modern Greek lexicography has only begun to develop in the last decade, and there are, as yet, no full-scale institutes for the publishing of dictionaries. The aim is not to review the dictionaries in question, something that has already been done on various occasions in academic journals, at conferences and in the press.
