| In the current socioeconomic climate, the notions of specialised communication and the teaching/learning of special second languages have come to the forefront. The majority of special communicative exchanges are conducted in English, and most of these are set in a business environment. From the recognition of the relevance and autonomy of lexis---especially terminology---in the teaching/learning of business English, we look at both terminology and lexicography in some detail with the aim of setting up a methodological as well as theoretical framework which allows for the consideration of terms as lexical units distinct on a semantic and pragmatic level from words. Since both metalexicography and practical lexicography have given due importance to the function of the dictionary as an artefact and have taken into consideration users' needs, lexicography emerges as a particularly suitable framework for the analysis of meaning representation as applied to the particular case of noun-terms in the business dictionary. Our research focuses on the linguistic category of meaning, albeit conceived in a narrow sense as that content which is internal to the lexical unit rather than resulting from the interaction of it with its surrounding lexical context. We look at the distribution of meaning along and across a number of lexicographic structures, namely: the macrostructure (treatment of homonymy), mediostructure (lemma and sublemma organization), the microstructure (definition, equivalent and example) and access structure (treatment of polysemy) in a sample of terminological as well as lexicographical works which encompass both a monolingual and a bilingual dimension. The thesis closes with a formalized proposal for the treatment of meaning in the bilingual business dictionary. |
