This book is the first comprehensive monograph on the Function Theory of Lexicography, which originated at the Aarhus School of Business (Aarhus University). Function Theory considers dictionaries to be tools that are constructed for assisting specific users with punctual needs in specific usage situations, e.g. communicative-oriented situations and cognitive-oriented situations. The book's main focus is on defending the independent academic status of lexicography and its corollary: The process of designing, compiling and updating (specialised) online dictionaries needs a theoretical framework that addresses general and specific aspects. The former are common to all types of information tools, the latter are mainly dependent on the media for which the information tool is constructed and their specific target users. This books offers both aspects and moves from the highest level of abstraction to very detailed aspects of lexicographic work, e.g. how to convert an originally-conceived polyfunctional online dictionary into several monofunctional usage-based ones. The book illustrates that the theory and the methodology currently used by advocates of the Function Theory of Lexicography offers better results than other approaches and therefore makes its case for proposing the Function Theory for terminological/terminographical work.

The book contains a state-of-the-art summary of the theoretical discussions within the field of lexicography during the last decades. On this basis it presents and argues for a new general theory, called the function theory. It goes on to develop this theory in one single field, i.e. learners lexicography where it both formulates the basic elements of a general theory for learnersa (TM) dictionaries as well as a number of specific theories for special subfields such as selection, meaning, semantic relations, morphology, syntactic properties and word combinations. It contains a big number of examples extracted from existing dictionaries which are discussed from the point of view of the theories formulated.