The Optimized Model Of Sense Ordering For ESL Dictionaries

Most words in a natural language are known to feature multiple senses and their senses tend to vary from one context to another. A polysemous phenomenon is now viewed as an indispensable feature of a language. Sense ordering has been taken as one of the key aspects of the microstructure of a dictionary, especially in ESL dictionary, for it has immediate impact on the dictionary use. Dictionaries have general principles of sense ordering for lexicographers to follow. The most traditional sense ordering approaches are historical sense ordering, logical sense ordering and frequency sense ordering. However, there are distinct pros and cons: some just attach great importance to the convenience of navigation but conceal the interrelations of polysemous senses; some put more emphasis on sense relations at no cost of easy access; thus none of which has been complete in both sides. Prototype theory, a notion proposed by American psychologist Eleanor Rosch in the mid 1970s, has now been employed to account for numerous linguistic phenomena. Many linguists have resorted to the prototypical approach to explain meaning of words or to present sense relations. According to the prototype theory, fuzziness exists in the boundaries of different categories. The status of members varies in a category: the most typical member situated in the central position while less typical ones are in marginal places. The senses of a polysemous word can correspondingly be taken as the collection of a category that is assigned memberships: the dominant sense is the prototypical sense while others are non-prototypical senses or sub-senses.Based on the findings of this newly established theory in cognitive semantics, this thesis succeeds in producing an optimized model that can help to improve the navigating efficiency at no cost of sense relations and in boosting language learner's polysemous acquisition. In addition, systematic MENU and SHORT CUT are supposed to be adopted as the supplement to prototype theory for the purpose of optimizing the existing sense ordering approaches. In the end, optimized prototype theory based models are designed by taking charge and cut as examples.