The Organization of Words in Gazulli’s Dictionary: Lexical and Grammatical Criteria

Abstract

Nikollë Gazulli’s Fjalorth i ri – Fjalë të rralla të përdorura në Veri të Shqipërisë (Tiranë, 1941) holds a prominent place in Albanian lexicography because of the volume of entries it records, the explanatory techniques it employs, its effort to isolate layers of borrowing, and the grammatical and stylistic qualifications applied to entries. It is the first regional dictionary to systematically apply Albanian–Albanian definitional practice. This article examines the dictionary’s compilation method, internal organization, and the lexical and grammatical criteria on which its compiler relied. Beginning from the assumption that figurative meaning is minimally realized at the level of the syntagm, the study offers a semantic-structural description of the figurative expressions sampled from the dictionary. It demonstrates that figurative meaning does not presuppose a special syntax and therefore does not require unique syntactic structures dedicated exclusively to generating figurative interpretation. Starting from this principle, figurative meaning may nonetheless modify the distribution of sentence constituents because syntax and semantics are tightly interconnected and differences in word meaning can correspond to differences in the ways those words link to other sentence constituents. The article concludes with an assessment of Gazulli’s achievements and shortcomings and with editorial recommendations for future editions.

Received: 01 September 2025 / Accepted: 26 October 2025 / Published: 05 November 2025