Active-passive principle in bilingual pedagogical lexicography

focus on grammar information

Abstract

Dictionary and grammar have an important relationship, since the definitions, information and examples that dictionaries present in their entries must follow the rules that the language grammar determines. For Rey-Debove and Morais (1984, p. 45) it is possible to learn a foreign language and the respective grammar with a dictionary, because the dictionary brings descriptions of the lexicon and grammar of a language. The lexical-grammatical knowledge allows a well-designed linguistic production and a more accurate understanding of words and phrases. The grammatical and syntactic information presented in the entries in the bilingual dictionaries are often the references for the student's use, construction and linguistic registration during the teaching and learning process. This work belongs to the field of Bilingual Pedagogical Lexicography and main objectives are (1) emphasize the active-passive principle as fundamental to encourage empirical researches in order to investigate students’ needs for lexicographical purposes; (2) present an analysis of Portuguese-English/ English -Portuguese pedagogical dictionaries regarding the active-passive principle. This article is divided into a theoretical and practical part, presenting in the latter a comparative analysis of the grammatical information, contained in the entries “ir” and “go” in two bilingual dictionaries Portuguese-English and English-Portuguese school: Longman Dicionário Escolar and Dicionário Oxford School Escolar. The adopted methodology consisted of theoretical studies and the establishment of analysis criteria to evaluate and compare the grammatical information that the dictionaries present. The analyzes are illustrated with images of the entries and followed by comments. The results reveal the tendency of dictionaries to provide generalized grammatical information, without taking into account the active-passive principle and the needs of students.