Multimodal resources in five school dictionaries

Abstract

The textual meaning can be reinforced by information’s value, its composition, its emphasis and also its disposition, so multimodal resources, if well organized, can help student to understand more widely lexicographic text, therefore, when exploring use of these resources, we can shed light on multimodal lexicography. In view of this, in this paper, we intend to reflect about some of the multimodal resources present in five school dictionaries that comprise PNLD 2012: Dicionários (Programme which divides dictionaries into four groups), namely: Dicionário Aurélio Ilustrado (FERREIRA, 2008), Dicionário Ilustrado de Português (BIDERMAN, 2009), Palavrinha Viva (BORBA, 2011), Saraiva Jovem (SARAIVA; OLIVEIRA, 2011), and Aurélio Júnior (FERREIRA, 2011). Based on Bernhardt (2004), Mozdzenski (2006), Kress and Van Leeuwen (2007), Farias (2010), Nascimento and Pontes (2011; 2020), we found illustrations and cross-references, among others, are efficient multimodal elements for complementing the meanings of lexical units. 38 representative entries from these five dictionaries were chosen for analysing. Comparing them, we noted effective multimodal features – images, different sizes of letters, bold and italic highlights, assorted colours, cross-references, attachments, etc. – for learning because, most often, they make clean definition. Therefore, lexicographical integration between languages (written and imagery) contributes to student’s lexical expansion.