Genera, differentiae and ideologies. An approach to the Aristotelian definition from an ideological analysis and Natural Semantic Metalanguage

With a mostly theoretical purpose of bringing together different research concerns seldom addressed together, this paper aims to explore to what extent the detection and examination of textual traces of some ideological conditionings in lexicographic definitions can be potentiated with the help of both the more traditional conception of lexicographic definition as an Aristotelian structure of genus + differentiae and the descriptive tools developed within the frame of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). In this sense, and by applying an analysis capable of simultaneously focusing on NSM’s primes and a set of textual loci especially salient in order to detect the lexicographer’s ideological standpoints (Rodríguez Barcia, “La realidad relativa” 30-31), this paper basically takes a set of terms whose definitions in nineteenth-century Spanish dictionaries, according to previous remarks by Rodríguez Barcia (“La realidad relativa”), could be considered as ideologically marked (i.e., not neutral), in order to discuss the extent to which lexicographic genera and differentiae might be understood as either frequent or infrequent textual/conceptual recipients of ideological biases.