It seems to be a generally accepted truth that examples have an important function in dictionaries. In spite of that there exists no general theory of dictionary examples. A sentence used as an example in a dictionary has a very different function from that of the same sentence used in normal communication. This means, for instance, that the problem of authenticity must be looked upon in a new way. A theory of dictionary examples could, as the German linguist Fritz Hermanns has shown, ha ve the cooperative principle and the conversational maximes of Grice (1975) as one point of departure.
