Identifying ideological strategies in the making of English language learners’ dictionaries

The aim of this paper is to show how lexicographical choices reflect ideological thinking, singled out by Eagleton (2007) into the strategies of rationalizing, legitimating, actionorienting, unifying, naturalizing and universalizing. It will be carried out by examining two twentyfirst century editions of each of the five English monolingual learner’s dictionaries published by Cambridge, Collins, Longman, Macmillan, and Oxford. The synchronic and diachronic analyses of the dictionaries and their different editions at the macrostructural level (the wordlists) and at the microstructural level (the definitional styles) will show how the reduction and change of data, derived from heterogeneous social and cultural contexts of language use, to abstract essential forms, involves decisions about the central and peripheral aspects of the lexicon and the meaning of words.