Betydelsebeskrivningens förutsätningar i en enspråkig ordbok

Monolingual dictionaries are by their very nature truly defining, unlike bilingual ( ormultilingual) dictionaries, translation dictionaries. This article is mainly about thesemantic basis of definition.Having distinguished in the lexicon of a natura! language lexical elements representing"languages within the language", that is, words which are provincial, sociallyand stylistically marked, as well as purely technical terminology, the author discussesthe more uniform system of a standard language. The key concept is lexeme. Alexeme can correspond to a word in the traditional sense but can also correspond to adistinct use of a word. lgnoring the phenomenon of synonymy, a lexeme contrastswith every other lexeme. There are also elements of opposition in a more specialsense. There are relatively often opposing pairs such as (in Swedish) fattig : rik; stor :liten; pojke : flicka; lärare : elev, besides which there are also fix.ed oppositions consistingof several elements, such as bäck : å : älv or sommar : höst : vinter : vår. Adistinct hierarchical order on a small scale, in the form of "mini semantic fields" (suchas the hyperonym vattendrag with its hyponyms bäck, å, älv) occurs in the lexicon.On the other hand, there does not appear to be any general hierarchical order for !argelexeme spheres, much less for the entire lexicon. In fäet, there is probably no overalllexical structure which would be a full equivalent to grarnmatical and phonologicalstructure.To put it in very general terms, the task of the lexicographer is to do justice to thelinguistic division of the conceptual world by means of lexemes and to the elements ofstructure in the strict sense which the lexicon undoubtedly displays