Lexicography and the Pragmatic Competence

Each speaker’s linguistic and pragmatic competences represent his/her whole set of linguistic knowledge. Lexicographers have of long been striving to present this knowledge in a general dictionary for various prescriptive, descriptive, or educational purposes. Yet, they have succeeded in compiling dictionaries that represent only the speakers’ linguistic competence rather than their complete knowledge of the language. Thus, neither have lexicographers completely succeeded in their efforts to describe the language of interest, nor have dictionaries, as educational tools, presented all the linguistic knowledge and information that speakers need to know when they speak a language. Most lexicographers confess that lexicography will not be possible without due heed to the pragmatic aspects of the language. This is because communication among the users of a language necessarily requires the use of the language appropriate to the context and to the settings in which communication occurs. It is common experience that, as a result of failure on the speaker’s part to observe all the pragmatic constraints involved, many a sentence that are otherwise (phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, and semantically) grammatical fail to convey to the hearer (reader) the message that was originally meant by the speaker (writer). The present article will investigate the pragmatic information that need to be included in general dictionaries and will further explore the methods and limitations in recording such data.