ABSTRACT
One way of looking at the monolingual dictionary is to see it as a practical means of using the words of a language to convey explicit information about the forms and meanings of the words of the same language. Another is to see it as a historically situated form of discourse through which certain linguistic communities have come to represent their languages to themselves and others. The first view emphasises communication through a transparent linguistic code capable of conveying explicit and unambiguous meanings about itself. The second is semiotic in the sense that it requires us to ‘stand back’ from the dictionary in order to consider not only what it says about the forms and meanings of words, but also the meanings that can be construed about the nature of the language from the forms and functions of the dictionary itself. It implies that we should, in Fishman’s (1995: 34) words, see dictionaries ‘as both resultant of and constructive of their contexts’.
