Estudio lexicográfico y significado metalingüístico de los sinónimos escoger y elegir

Abstract

Who uses a dictionary to find explanations of the differences between words with similar meanings does not easily find the nuances that differentiate these terms in the definitions. The entries do not provide the basic elements that are essential for the user to be able to choose one or the other term when he or she is producing or translating a text. In dictionaries, they are often used as synonyms or, at most, they are distinguished on the basis of stylistic factors, such as the greater or lesser formality of the discourse in which they are used, or diatopic factors. The number of examples and collocations is small, the explanations are not exhaustive, and the emphasis is on the extra-linguistic world. Almost no account is taken of the communicative context, nor of the speaker's attitude and communicative intentions.

On the basis of these considerations, the present study analyses the phenomenon of synonymy from the point of view of its lexicographical treatment in monolingual dictionaries of Spanish in order to verify whether the works examined are useful to the user, i.e. whether they offer the necessary information for the adequate use of the lexicon of related meaning.

In order to shed light on the metalinguistic dimension, we will apply to two synonymous verbs escoger and elegir conceptual tools that have so far been applied to grammar. The study of the functioning of the verbs elegir and escoger through two axes that articulate semantic meaning from a metalinguistic point of view (procedural meaning): the axis of information and the axis of the attitude of the enunciator (as formalised in meta-operational grammar) will allow us to perceive regularities in their use and in their connotations that are also systematically generated in other synonymic verb pairs.