Stellan Petersson

The overall theme of this paper is the balance between descriptive adequacy and discrimination in dictionaries. More specifically, the purpose is to describe the process of revising dictionary articles related to the grounds of discrimination in the forthcoming edition of the Swedish monolingual dictionary Svensk ordbok utgiven av Svenska Akademien [The Contemporary Dictionary of the Swedish Academy], which is expected to be published in 2020. The focus of the article is on the semantic fields related to sex, transgender identity or expression, ethnicity, religion or other belief, disability, sexual orientation and age. Updates of the lemma list, based on a more diverse data set, are presented. Furthermore, revisions of definitions and linguistic examples, motivated by the new data and principles of inclusion, are shown. We also discuss usage labels of negatively charged words and explore cross-references and their role in facilitating non-discriminatory word choices. Moreover, methodological questions are raised, and the role of corpora and other data gathering methods are considered.

In the debate about semantic context dependence, various truth-conditional frameworks have been proposed. Indexicalism, associated with e.g. Jason Stanley, accounts for contextual effects on truth conditions in terms of a rich covert syntax. Truth-conditional pragmatics, associated with e.g. François Recanati, does not locate the mechanisms for context dependence in the syntactic structure but provides a more complex semantics. In this dissertation, the hypothesis that indexicalism and truth-conditional pragmatics are empirically equivalent is explored. The conclusion that the hypothesis is correct emerges, when claims and accounts in the debate are made formally precise, within the framework of model-theoretic semantics.