Exemplification in the prepositional entries of bilingual dictionaries. Theory and practice

The first part of the article deals with the function of the examples in bilingual dictionaries, compared to their function in monolingual ones. First, it is argued that examples in an active bilingual dictionary should principally exemplify the use of the headword’s translation equivalents rather than the headword itself, as it is in the case of monolingual dictionaries. Then a survey is made dealing with examples selected from all simple preposition entries in a recent Polish-French dictionary, taking into consideration both the structure and the function of these examples. The general conclusion is that in the investigated entries exemplifi cation fails seriously enough to make it impossible for users to choose the appropriate equivalent of a particular preposition