Introducing Emotioncy as a Contribution to Persian Lexicography

A dictionary is a repository of various kinds of linguistic information about words. It presents general information about words such as the words’ meaning, pronunciation, etymology, and the syntactic category to which it belongs, collocational or idiomatic structures in which it may be found. Given the significance of linguistic information presented in the dictionaries, Persian dictionaries suffer from lack of psycho-cultural information which reflects and presents the culture of a society and as the result, should necessarily be included in them. Keeping the importance of this kind of information in mind, and considering the significance of psychological factors in speakers’ knowledge of the world as well as considering sensory experience as the cornerstone of emotional and cognitive abilities and believing that reality is relative, drawing upon the newly proposed sensory concept of emotioncy, this study attempts to introduce emotioncy and its components (emotion, sense and frequency) as useful tools in dictionary making. To this end, the present study will shed some light on sensory and emotional experiences of words of the languages so as to ultimately uncover the origins of the gap in the current dictionaries and enrich them by adding some missed but important and useful information about the words of the languages. Finally, although the findings of the present study is suggestive, further research into the this may help develop it in a broader empirical framework.