The Use of Ostensive Definition as an Explanatory Technique in the Presentation of Semantic Information in Dictionary-Making

Abstract

Lexicography – The theory and practice of dictionary making – is a multifarious activity involving a number of ordered steps. It essentially involves the management
of a language’s word stock. Hartmann (1983: vii) mmarises the main aspects of the lexicographic management of vocabulary into three main activities, viz. recording, description and presentation. The stages involved in dictionary-making may be outlined as follows (paraphrasing Gelb’s(1958) five-step model): (a) Identification, selection and listing of lexical items (b) sequential arrangement of lexical units (c) parsing and excerpting of entries (d) semantic specification of each unit (e) dictionary compilation from processed data and publication of the final product. The present article focuses specifically on one aspect of the intermediate stages of this rather
complex process of dictionary-making: the stage that lexicographers generally consider to be the principal stage in the entire process and one that is at the
very heart of the raison d’être of every monolingual linguistic dictionary, namely semantic specification. The main thesis being developed here is that semantic
specification can be greatly enhanced by the judicious use of pictorial illustrations (as a complement to a lexicographic definition) in monolingual dictionaries,
and as an essential lexicographic device. This feature is discussed under the broad concept of ostensive definition as an explanatory technique in dictionarymaking. The concept is discussed with specific reference to its application to monolingual dictionaries for African languages. Its role in the presentation of sense values of lemmas (headwords) as well as its limitations are briefly discussed within the framework of the semasiological approach to the presentation of semantic information.