The simultaneous approach and the temporal approach and their impact on the structure of the dictionary text. Application to the “Larousse-French: Lexis” dictionary.

Abstract

French lexicography has experienced during the rwentieth century, two main
lexicographical trends: one based on the application of the diachronic approach that
takes into account aspects related to the “past history" of the lexical unit constituting
the main entry, and another based on the application of the synchronic approach that
rejects the historical aspects and considers in the treatment of the lexical unit only its
current use. Yet, French lexicography has experienced in the late seventies of the last
century à third stream, based on a kind of a conciliation between the two trends by
adopting some aspects of each, and applied in the "Larousse de la langue française:
Lexis”, composed under the direction of J. Dubois (Larousse, 1979). It is this third
trend, which we qualify as "synchro-diachronic", and its role in structuring the
dictionary article, which is the subject of our study. According to Lexis, this trend takes,
indeed, from the synchronic approach the principle of "unbundling” by distributing
the main uses of the same lexical unit of two or more lexical entries regarding them
as "homonyms", but he mentions under each entry its derivatives. It adopts from
the diachronic approach the principles of etymology, dating and distribution of the
different meanings derived from the same primary meaning of a network of secondary
entries numbered, and considered as polysemes. This tendency to reconcile the two
approaches and the two trends had a great influence on the structure of the dictionary
article becoming complex after being simple in traditional dictionaries.