The influence of persuasion on definitions style: configuration of cosmopolitanism in dictionaries
In the present times many an academic work appear about the meaning and the manifestations of cosmopolitanism in Western countries, offering views of different types and range, mainly in areas related to philosophy, political science and sociology. Assuming the thesis that language, being the creation of a given society, shapes its world, the author argues that for centuries the term cosmopolitanism not only remained until our days, but also had a considerable influence on human history at least in Western countries. As belonging to political vocabulary, the term cosmopolitism constitutes an important base in the building of individual or communitarian views of the world. It is a multilayer, inexact, and natural concept blurred in function of the context, being difficult to find a good and stable definition for it, and thus constituting an extraordinary graceful field for lexicographers to express themselves.
The article’s author analyses the stylization of lexicographic definitions of cosmopolitanism included in particular Polish dictionaries, on the background of foreign languages definitions. Within this analysis she accents the mechanisms, which lead to changing the lexicographic shape of the term cosmopolitanism’s meaning depending on time.