From the point of view of linguistics, a dictionary is a representation of a lexicon. Its place in a comprehensive language description therefore mirrors the place of the lexicon in a language. In this functional context, a dictionary contributes to the description of a language system in describing the inventory of its signs. From this purpose follow the types of information contained in the dictionary and the relations these bear to other components of a comprehensive description (s. Lehmann 2002). In particular:

Dictionary and text corpus

• The text-words occurring in the corpus are tokens of types abstractions of which constitute the lemmas of the dictionary. Technically, there might be a link from every single text word to the dictionary entry which it represents.¹
• The examples used in dictionary entries are culled from the corpus. Technically, the dictionary contains, for each example, a reference to some place in the corpus.

Dictionary and language system

• The phonological representation of the lemma obeys the principles of the phonology.
• The orthographic representation of the lemmas follows principles stipulated in the orthography.
• The categorization of a dictionary entry according to various morphological and syntactic classes, including the indication of constructions (and valency frames) in which it is used, is based on categories treated in the grammar.

Dictionary and setting of the language

• The encyclopedic information refers to the ethnographic setting of the language and its speech community.
• The information on social variation refers to the social situation of the language.
• Dialectal and etymological information refers to the internal and external genetic situation of the language.

For the lexicographer, these multiple relations have two main implications:

• The pieces of information in all of these components complement each other. The information contained in the dictionary must be portioned and systematized within that larger framework.
• Lots of references and cross-references have to be built into the dictionary (as well as the other components of the overall description). See the section on references.

¹ The hedge in this assertion is necessary because the dictionary lemma is an abstraction over types of text tokens. For instance, allomorphs occurring in the text do not constitute lemmas of a dictionary. See the section on lemmatization.