Språkprovens form och funktion i svenska betydelseordböcker från Östergrens Nusvensk ordbok till Svensk ordbok

Abstract

Verbal illustrations, or examples, play an important role in most monolingual
defining dictionaries. In this paper, five defining dictionaries of modem Swedish are
investigated from this point of view. A couple of questions are focused in particular,
namely (a) whether the examples of the dictionaries are mainly authentic, or mainly
'semi-authentic' (based on authentic texts, but modified) or freely invented, and (b)
which different functions (e.g., syntactic, semantic, connotational, encyclopedic) the
examples have. Among other things, it tums out that most examples in the Swedish
dictionaries are either semi- or non-authentic.