ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a synthesis of theoretical background and methodologies that are now available to lexicographers to help them keep the record of the vocabulary up-to-date. It reflects on how lexicography can expand and improve its techniques to give a complete and updated account of its changing object of study. The chapter also explores the application of various specific techniques for the analysis of lexical change and experimental results are shown in Spanish. It should be noted, however, that the focus is more on the method than on the result: it is not so much the specific units obtained that are of interest (because they become outdated over time) as the method used to obtain them.
The structure of the chapter is as follows: in section 2 the general framework of linguistic change is addressed. Then, in section 3, we review the background of the study of lexical change from a lexicographical point of view and we also address empirically issues such as vocabulary size estimation (3.1), lexical neology (3.2), lexical loss (3.3), semantic change (3.4) and geolectal lexical variation (3.5). The chapter ends in section 4 with a discussion on the change of epistemological view that these developments in modern lexicography may bring about.
