Affixed Words With Derogatory Meaning in English-Albanian and Albanian-English Dictionaries

Abstract

Albanian has a lexicographic tradition of 400 years old and a valuable fund of over 500 dictionaries. Regarding bilingual
dictionaries, it can be compared with countries, whose lexicography is really developed. English lexicographic tradition dates back to
1680s. Dictionaries are not only evaluated by the volume of words they reflect, but also by the lexico-pragmatic groups, relating to
definite conceptual fields that are reflected by maintaining the proportions and scales that are set among these groups. The words in
bilingual dictionary can be reviewed even by the emotional connotation criterion. The words are divided into two big groups. In neutral
words that do not have in their semantic structure emotional semas and words with emotional connotation. Words with emotional
connotation are not only an inseparable part of speech among people, but they are also found in bilingual English-Albanian and
Albanian-English dictionaries. The more words, the dictionary’s macrostructure has, the more words with emotional connotation it will
have. In this paper we treat the pragmatic subgroup of affixed words with emotional derogatory meaning in English and Albanian, and
Albanian-English dictionaries, focusing on similarities, differences and the lexico-semantic relativization phenomenon between them.
This contrastive analysis emphasizes the fact, that they belong to two different language families and these languages differ in important
ways from one another.