Conjunctions in school dictionaries for high school

Abstract

Dictionaries are works that describe the lexicon in its most varied forms. Therefore, along with grammars, one of its roles is to present information about grammatical words, whose meaning is usually related to their syntactic function. This is the case of conjunctions. Understood as grammatical elements generally used to connect textual elements, they are fundamental for textual cohesion. Based on this context, this paper aims at describing the lexicographic information present in the entries of the subordinating conjunctions that and if in the type 4 school dictionaries of the Brazilian National Plan for the Didactic Books collection (2012 edition). In order to understand the concept of conjunction, we discuss the ideas of researchers such as Cunha and Cintra (2017), Bechara (2001) and Bagno (2012), in addition to the works of Pontes (2009) and Brazil (2012) to understand how school dictionaries are organized. As for the analysis of the data, this research has qualitative and descriptive orientation. Our results indicate that most of the entries analyzed have grammatical orientation in the lexicographic information they present about integral conjunctions, addressing their syntactic function, as commonly occurs in grammars. We could notice that the grammatical approach given to conjunctions in the works we have analyzed is oriented by standard language prescriptions, based on grammar rules and nomenclature, what hinders the comprehension of the entries for readers who do not know syntactic prescriptions, especially those related to compound sentences structure.