Lexicographic Illustration: Towards a Syntactic-Semantic Typology of Pictorial Illustrations in Persian Monolingual Dictionaries

Applying pictorial illustrations aids the lexicographer in defining lemmas and clarifying the meaning of entries. The present study, based on Steinchr('39')s (1991) categories, looks at the inclusion of pictorial illustrations in three Persian monolingual dictionaries, including Amid Persian Dictionary, Moein Persian dictionary, and Sokhan Comprehensive Dictionary, intending to define a syntactic-semantic typology of pictorial illustrations in Persian monolingual dictionaries. This corpus based analytic survey is done to answer which items are mostly illustrated, considering the semantic field and the part of speech of illustrated lemmas, as well as study visual characteristics of pictures and their place of insertion. The other purpose of this paper is to investigate which methods can improve the efficiency of pictorial illustrations in dictionaries. The results of this survey indicate that domestic and contextualized pictures along with a proper reference to their headwords can enhance the communicative function of Persian monolingual dictionaries. It is also revealed that the co-reference of illustrations and headwords are fulfilled via the juxtaposition of pictures to the dictionary entries or through some verbal support that relates illustrations to the respective lemma. In all three mentioned Persian dictionaries, concrete nouns are the most illustrated headwords. This research shows that the typological analysis of pictorial illustrations in dictionaries can provide a better understanding of illustrative structures in monolingual lexicography so that planning for the visual aspects of the new generation of Persian monolingual dictionaries would be more feasible..