Bilingual English-Persian Dictionaries from a Pragmatic Perspective: Labeling in Focus

The advent of pragmatics into language studies has benefited different areas of linguistics, including lexicography, in general and bilingual lexicography, in particular. To integrate pragmatics into dictionaries lexicographers provide their users with sufficient information about style and register or as Yong and Peng (2007) call it "the socio-cultural aspects of language use," and one widely accepted strategy employed by lexicographers is appropriate labeling. This study attempts to investigate the practice of the three most frequently used English-Persian dictionaries in allocation of labels to words with pragmatic peculiarities. In so doing, 282 words with such restrictions were sampled and categorized into four categories to see the treatment of these dictionaries as far as labeling is concerned. To evaluate the treatment of these dictionaries both internal and external criteria have been taken into consideration. The study revealed that the deficiencies in the labeling system of the existing English-Persian dictionaries can be attributed to the (1) low rate of labeling; (2) inaccurate labeling; and (3) inconsistency in the use of labels implemented.