Publication details
Actitudes lingüísticas en el Diccionario de Autoridades (1726-1739)
| Title in English | Language attitudes in the first Spanish Royal Academy Dictionary (1726-1739) |
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | As Luis Fernando Lara (1997) states, dictionaries are lexical corpora that reflect the sociocultural reality and power relations in force at the time of their writing. Therefore, they provide much information not only lexical, but also sociolinguistic, about the pragmatics of use at the time and the opinions of their editors - generally representatives of the wealthy classes - about the good or bad use of certain words that, at the same time, contain opinions about people, ethnic groups or social classes that supposedly use them. These kinds of opinions are known in sociolinguistics under the name of linguistic attitudes (Moreno Fernández 2009) and, as Langer and Nesse (2014) warn, dictionaries are a legitimate and adequate source for their study, capable of providing new data and possible innovative methodological approaches (Mühlschlegel 2020). The focus of this communication will be the linguistic attitudes present in the Diccionario de Autoridades (1726-1739). On the first scholarly dictionary there is an abundant bibliographical production, but to our knowledge, its sociolinguistic study has not yet been undertaken. First of all, we will pay attention to the negative attitudes, represented, among others, by voices or uses qualified as low, plebeian or vulgar. We will then focus on positive attitudes reflected, for example, in comments on the propriety, elegance, or necessity of other voices and their usages. Our aim will be to trace possible patterns governing attitudes. In the case of the negative ones, we will be interested in whether they refer to certain ethnic groups, social classes or regional varieties of the language. As for the positive ones, our focus will be on comments referring to desired social behaviors, socio-cultural and technological advances, or power relations considered as legitimate and natural. |
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