The District Archive of Bragança as an open door to the past: linguistic representations in lexicographical works

ABSTRACT

The District Archive of Bragança aims to “recolher, gerir, preservar, valorizar e difundir o património dos arquivos da região” (cf. official website: collect, manage, preserve, value and disseminate the heritage of the archives in the region [authors’ translation]) of Bragança, in the northeast of Portugal. It is here that we find the most relevant document sources, namely the Seminar of Bragança and families from the region that donated their bibliographical collections. In the Archive, Deposit A is where the oldest books are to be found, in various Romanic and Germanic languages. The research team is developing a project of inventorying the lexicographical works found in Deposit A, collecting data about their macro and microstructures, along with photographic records. Henceforth, we described a hundred works in Portuguese, Latin, French and Spanish. Based on the inventory that has already been made, we applied an exploratory-descriptive methodology on a sample of five dictionaries and reflected upon the linguistic ideas they convey, in line with the paper by Chávez Fajardo & Dorado Puntch (2016). Through the analysis of the paratexts of these dictionaries, we concluded that these macrostructural elements reflect the linguistic representations of their authors concerning their target audiences, lexicography and the validation of their products towards lexicographical authority. All the authors draw on their predecessors for validation, attempting to add innovative and enhanced elements, in accordance with the aims of the work.

Keywords:
lexicography; language dictionaries; macrostruture; ADBGC; paratexts