Abstract

Modern dictionaries tend to be mostly descriptive rather than prescriptive; in other words, they are designed to describe the living language in use and its current developments of word-meaning. Thus, approaching the tradition of dictionary-making from a pragmatic perspective is as needed as ever. The majority of the studies conducted since the ’90s of the previous century have focused on the pragmatic information included in usage labels, usage notes, examples of usage, and visual illustrations. The main purpose of this research is to redefine pragmatics within lexicography as an inherently present component of the word-meaning of words with certain deictic loading, such as personal pronouns, demonstratives, time and place adverbs, verbs of motion, etc. As deictic terms have a high degree of deictability, their dictionary definitions are naturally expected to include appropriate pragmatic information. However, our observations show that the distribution of the pragmatic component in dictionary definitions is not homogeneous. Thus, within the scope of the present research an attempt is made to suggest ways to systematically integrate the pragmatic component into dictionary definitions of deictic words.