Lexical meaning in Albanian language textbooks of pre-university education

Abstract

Lexical meaning, as an important and essential aspect of the word, has long attracted the attention of scholars, who, in trying to know its nature, have sometimes mystified it by seeing it as an inexplicable thing and sometimes simplified it, equating it with the function of the word, with the concept, even with the realie^[1] itself that it signifies. Each meaning is explained separately, but keeping in mind the other meanings of the word, when it is polysemantic. The purpose of explaining meaning is to connect us with realie or something^[2]  of the reality that the word signifies in that sense, to identify and distinguish it intact from other realities similar to it. Thus we have the water spaces lake, sea, ocean, but in explaining the meaning of the words that mark them we will aim to distinguish them from each other: det, -i (sea) «very large space with salt water, which is usually surrounded by earth not on all sides »; liqen, -i (lake) m «very large natural or artificial pond, usually with fresh water, which is surrounded on all sides by land»; oqean, -i (ocean) m «very large space of salt water that stretches between continents».

 As can be seen, in these simplified explanations, in addition to the common semantic components, some differentiating semantic components are given that serve to distinguish the meanings of the respective words.

By thoroughly analyzing the corpus of words unknown to students present in today's Albanian language textbooks of pre-university education, our article aims to provide an almost complete picture of the typology of explaining language units unknown to students, as it turns out in the textbooks we are talking about while giving some methodological recommendations to improve the work with students' vocabulary in the future. In general, we can say from the beginning that textbook compilers, in order to explain language units unknown to students, have used at least four types of explanations: descriptive explanation, definition explanation, paraphrasing explanation and synonymous explanation , which will be discussed in more detail in this article.