2－Text and Discourse_Beaugrande.doc

In Ad Hermans (ed.), Les dictionnaires specialisés et l’analyse de la valeur. Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters, 1997, 57-74. ? Text Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, and the Discourse of Dictionaries ? Robert de Beaugrande ? ? A. Dictionaries as Discourse? The title of this paper may strike an unaccustomed note in the sense that a dictionary is not typically conceived to be discourse or a discourse type. Instead, it is widely regarded as a type of list or listing whose organisational principles differ substantially from discourse in the everyday sense. The discrepancy recedes, however, if we define discourse not as an artefact of language based on the model of everyday conversation, but as any communicative event among participants (see Beaugrande in preparation). We then shift our focus from dictionary as a tangible artefact of paper and ink over to the compilation and the use of dictionaries as communicative occasions occurring under characteristic circumstances. In view of the social, intellectual and linguistic importance of dictionaries it might be considered curious that they have received so little attention in their own right. The modest statements of principle and method occurring at the beginning of most commercially published dictionaries are seldom read by the users, as if there was nothing in any way complicated or problematic in the achievement which the dictionary represents. No doubt this widespread disinterest reflects the folk wisdom that words are relatively reliable and stable units whose meanings can readily be captured in an orderly list of definitions. The same folk wisdom would hold that discourses are simply combinations or series of such units whose significance in turn derives from a corresponding combination of their meanings as represented by those definitions. Among the leading discoveries upon which a whole series of intellectual and scientific trends have converged since the middle of the 20th century has been the acknowledgement