Electronic dictionaries and the integration of prosody in the lexicographical treatment of polysemy

We discuss here the way the integration of sound files in lexical-lexicographical entries, which is made possible by the electronic nature of e-dictionaries, opens a new frontier in lexicographical work, by making possible the integration of prosodic features in the description of words. We start by showing the relevance of prosody at a lexical level, and hence by defining “lexical prosody”, using results obtained in linguistic semantics. We then present some of the most important conditions, consequences and challenges of the integration of prosody in lexicography, showing that it cannot be limited to the addition of sound forms in existing descriptions but implies corpus-based studies of the relationship between prosodic features and polysemy. Using monolingual and bilingual descriptions of French enfin (at last, finally etc.), we then describe the way taking into account prosody reshape the description of a lexical entry, and argue for the necessity of a plurisemic structuring of such descriptions.