La especialización semántica de los gentilicios y su descripción en el Diccionario de Autoridades

Abstract

This work deals with the semantic-denotative processes
developed by certain demonyms or gentilic words registered by the first
Spanish academic dictionary: Diccionario de Autoridades (1726-1739). Firstly,
gentilic function is described for explaining how the secondary or tertiary semantic variations of these units are formed. After that, we
show which class of deonomastics words are gathered up by this dictionary
in order to separate detoponyms from pure gentilic words and those
which have acquired new specialized senses in XVIII century. Third,
lexicalization processes are explained for stating some general considerations
about the lexicographical description of the demonyms.