¿Puede ser moderno un diccionario académico?

Abstract

Modern lexicography, understood as a science applied to language, tends to be descriptive. Does this mean that academic dictionaries, clearly normative, cannnot be modern? In order to address this question, the concepts of ‘descriptivism’ and ‘normativity’ , their inter-relations and their manifestations in lexicography are revised. The necessity to distinguish between the dictionary’s normativity (intrinsic) and the reader´s normativity (extrinsic), and the notion that, although any lexicopraphic work may be extrinsically normative, it is the lexicographer’s task to regulate such normativity and to accept that dictionaries must serve a standardizing purpose, regardless their modern and descriptive claims. Modernization of academic lexicography can be pursued from these premises.