'Falconry’, a popular domain in an 18th-century dictionary: lexicographical treatment of the domain label

Activity: Talk or presentationOral presentation

Description

Domain labels in general language dictionaries have been a topic of interest for many researchers. In the present paper, we aim to contribute to that literature by studying domain labelling in an 18 th -century heritage dictionary that is being back digitized in the scope of the MORDigital project: the Diccionario da Lingua Portugueza, commonly known as the Morais dictionary. We have taken the fixed text of the first edition (1789) and selected a very popular domain in that century: falconry (“volateria”). This domain appears in the list of abbreviations on the front matter of the dictionary (p. xi) and is identified as follows: “Volat.”, abbreviation, of the domain “Volateria”.

In terms of methodology, firstly, we confirmed the existence of the term “volateria”, “the art of hunting birds”, in the dictionary. This term is preceded by the variant spelling “volataria”, which does not display the domain label. We then collected the 33 lexicographical articles related to the selected domain and analysed them. In the third stage, we explored how that domain is identified in the microstructure of the lexicographic articles collected.
Period23 Jun 2022
Event title12th International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology: West meets East
Event typeConference
LocationLorient, FranceShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • digital humanities
  • domain labelling
  • legacy dictionary
  • lexicography
  • TEI