DICTIONARY DEFINITIONS AS GENERALIZED VERBAL DESCRIPTIONS OF THE MEANINGS OF WORDS STORED IN THE COLLECTIVE MEMORY OF LANGUAGE SPEAKERS

The purpose of the article is to determine how the ideas about the content of words stored in the memory of native speakers relate to the interpretations of words given in dictionaries. In order to fi nd an answer to this question, it is convenient to rely on the concept of L. V. Shcherba, outlined in his article on the threefold aspect of linguistic phenomena. Arguing with F. de Saussure, L. V. Shcherba suggests seeing in language as a system of signs not one, but two phenomena: fi rstly, “linguistic material”, i. e. the memory of numerous speech fragments perceived by each native speaker throughout their lives stored in the consciousness, and secondly, “linguistic systems”, i. e. generalized descriptions of units of “linguistic material”, intended for recording in dictionaries. The “linguistic material” in the memory of native speakers is visual or other sensory images of objects and situations of reality, associatively connected with words, while the components of “linguistic systems” are generalized verbal descriptions of these sensory images. For this reason, constructing defi nitions of words for dictionaries is a complex process of creating generalized verbal descriptions of those features of sensory images that are contained in the “linguistic material” and are important for understanding and using words. To correctly construct dictionary definitions, a lexicographer must have a rich “linguistic material”, which is usually a dictionary card index or a computer corpus of texts, and have the skills to carefully analyze it logically. Insufficient volume of “linguistic material” or its superficial analysis causes the appearance of incorrect dictionary definitions, examples of which are given in the article.