Las dedicatorias en los diccionarios: caracterización lingüística de una tradición discursiva

Abstract Although it rarely appears in modern dictionaries, one of the most characteristic texts in the hyperstructure of dictionaries from the 16th to the 19th centuries is the dedication to authority. In it, the lexicographer extols the figure of the dedicatee and asks them to protect their work, while explaining the necessity and reasons for the existence of the dictionary being presented. Based on the framework of Coserian Variational Linguistics and, specifically, on the theory of discourse traditions, this study will extract the main characteristics of the discourse tradition of the dedication (understood as a subgenre of the discourse tradition of the epistle) through a linguistic and discursive analysis focused on the length, structure, sequences and inter-sentential syntactic relations. This study will be conducted on a diachronic corpus (16th–19th centuries) of 20 dictionary dedications.