Het belang van semantische homogeniteit in dialectwoordenboeken

Samenvatting

Within the field of (dialect) lexicography, there has been a discussion of the merits and demerits of the thematic arrangement as implemented in dictionaries like the Dictionary of the Flemish Dialects (WVD). The discussion (as brought up in particular in contributions by Weijnen and De Tollenaere in the 1960’s) focuses on the question whether lexical meaning can be represented in the micro-structure of such dictionaries. In recent literature, there is some consensus that this is indeed problematic. This paper, however, shows that the arguments in favour of this claim are not fully convincing and that, in fact, giving up the idea that meaning cannot be rendered in dictionaries like wvd has brought with it some undesirable consequences for the relevance and significance of the data for follow-up studies in various directions.