Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 129 supplementum (2012)

just (good) friends 
used for emphasizing that two people are not having a romantic 
relationship. People sometimes use this expression to suggest that two people really are 
having a romantic relationship, even though they claim they are not. (
MEDAL2
)
A definition like this would have been unimaginable, say, forty years ago, when 
dictionaries were still heavily restrained by expectations of presentational economy. 
It would have been perceived as too ‘chatty’, not streamlined or elegant enough – 
not to mention the fact that, because 
just (good) friends
is a seemingly transparent 
phrase, most dictionaries would not have bothered to record it at all. 
1.5. Encyclopaedic ‘contamination’
The difficulties in conveying non-denotative meaning are not the only trouble-
some consequence of the referent-oriented nature of the classical definition format. 
A related problem is how to separate linguistic from encyclopaedic information in 
the definitions of nouns (the only part of speech featuring in both kinds of refer-
ence work). To be precise, this is only a problem for those who believe in the necessity 
of such a separation, but until recently that meant almost everyone.
12
Any attempt to ensure that no encyclopedic information whatsoever finds its way 
into dictionary definitions is, of course, doomed to failure. Rey (2000: 2) appears to 
be stating the obvious when he says that
[t]he classical opposition between definitions of words and definitions of things, 
discussed especially in the 17
th
and 18
th
centuries, is hardly satisfactory (…) ‘word’ 
and ‘thing’ are too brutally contrasted.
12
In some lexicographic traditions, a distinction is made between two types of dictionaries: those 
more strictly linguistic and those that allow a reasonable amount of encyclopaedic informa-
tion. Accordingly, the French distinguish between 
dictionnaires de mots
and 
dictionnaires de 
choses
; the Germans have 
Sprachwörterbücher
and 
Sachwörterbücher
. 

---

332 
ARLETA ADAMSKA-SAŁACIAK
All the same, much has been written about how one should define so-called nat-
ural-kind words (names of plants, animals, minerals) without contaminating the 
purely linguistic definition with information which belongs in an encyclopaedia. It is 
not beyond the realms of possibility that certain pioneers of English lexicography 
may have been trying to address this problem when they produced the following 
definitions: