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‘never been married’, which are then reassembled into the lexically relevant noun phrase,
‘man who has never been married’. The content of this definition characterizes the
meaning and reference of the word bachelor, while the form of the definition—a
countable noun phrase—instantiates the grammatical use of the word bachelor—a
countable noun. Thus nouns are defined by noun phrases; verbs by verb phrases—which
for transitive verbs may contain a slot for the direct object; adverbs, prepositions,
adjectives, and even some bound morphemes (see MORPHOLOGY) by phrases or
clauses that can function in the same way as the definiendum.
Such standard dictionary definitions may be classified into:
(a) definitions by synonym, in which all the information is compressed into a single
lexical unit (e.g. gorgeous: ‘striking’);
(b) analytical definitions, in which primary syntactic, semantic, and referential
information is provided by one part of the definition, the genus, and secondary
information by the rest, the differentiae (e.g. gorgeous: ‘strikingly beautiful’, where
beautiful is the genus and strikingly the differentia);
(c) formulaic definitions, in which primary semantic and referential information is
provided by one part of the definition, while the rest provides primary syntactic
information together with secondary semantic and referential information (e.g.
gorgeous: ‘of/ having/that has striking beauty’).
A single lexical unit may have more than one definition: these definitions may be linked
by parataxis (apposition or asyndetic co-ordination, as in gorgeous: ‘of striking beauty,
stunning’) or hypotaxis (subordination, as in gorgeous: ‘of striking beauty; specifically,
stunning’).
Besides standard dictionary definitions, ordinary people, including lexicographers off
duty, use definitions of other types, such as ‘tired is when you want to lie down’. Such
folk-definitions are used in some dictionaries for young children. For example, The
Charlie Brown Dictionary has hog: ‘When a male pig grows, he becomes a hog.’ Nonstandard
definitions are also used in the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary
(COBUILD, 1987), which has hog: ‘A hog is a male pig that has been castrated’.
Translation. The process of definition yields a definition as its product. At the level
of a whole text, the process of translation likewise yields as its product a translation. But
the translation of a lexically relevant unit need not yield a relexicalized translation of that
unit. Sometimes, instead, it yields a definition, especially in the case of culture-specific
items like Scotch egg, which Collins-Roberts explains as æuf dur enrobé de chair à
saucisse; sometimes a discussion, as for pragmatically restricted routine formulae from a
very different culture, and sometimes nothing at all, as when one language uses, for
instance, a preposition (Spanish: María vio a Clara) in constructions in which another
language uses none (English: Maria saw Clara).
Furthermore, the process of context-free lexical translation can produce translation
equivalents either at the level of lexical units, or at the level of their morphemic
representation. Thus there is a difference between the superficially similar English-
French equations penicillin:pénicilline, where one English lexical unit has been translated
into one French lexical unit, and crane noun: grue, where an English representation of
two lexical units has been translated into a French representation of two analogous lexical
units. The first case is a translation of an English one-one lexical mapping into a French