Open Access

Doris Sava

• The modern lexicography must meet certain requirements in order to ensure an adequate lexicographical coverage of the presented lexical inventory. The relevant published literature dedicated to the profile of lemmas within the current lexicographical practice reveals shortcomings that reflect the gap between the current linguistic reality and the usual lexicographical practice. From the user’s perspective and his consulting needs modern metalexicography stresses the need for a fair lexicographical exposure, empirically grounded, capable of indicating peculiarities and restrictions of the usage within the language. Parting from theoretical considerations, regarding the relevance of the criteria that define the quality of a lexicographical work, the principle of addressability and the current phraseographic practice, the article presents directions and ways of researching for the phraseological inventory in terms of relevant peculiarities for the mono- or bilingual lexicographical practice. Exemplary there are discussed modern empirical methods meant to improve the current lexicographical practice insisting upon the evidence provided by the corpus as object and means of verifying the hypothesis of theoretical or applied research. The analysis of occurrences extracted from corpora is a valuable tool for the lexicographer because it allows the identification of the specific characteristics belonging to fixed structures within usual multiple contexts, patterns of use, concordances and co-selections. An authoritative body of linguistic evidence allows observations of mutations occurring in use or frequency of distributions, as well as identifying outlying areas of phraseology which so far have been insufficiently investigated or ignored by the lexicographical practice.