The Grammatical Differences Between BrE And AmE In Learners' Dictionaries

British English and American English are two chief national varieties of the English language, both of which are developed from Early Modern English. Influenced by the history, they differ from each other in a multitude of ways-pronunciation, spelling, word choice, style, pragmatics and grammar, among which grammatical differences are perhaps the least important as a practical matter since they are the least confusing factors to speakers of one variety encountering another one. Nevertheless, Lexicography is increasingly paying attention to the grammatical differences between BrE and AmE. Therefore, there is still a need for a further detailed examination of it. And the focus of this thesis is on verbs.The thesis firstly reviews the development of BrE and AmE. From the perspective of history, connections and differences between BrE and AmE are explored. Focusing on the differences between the two language varieties, six typical items of verbs' grammatical differences are illustrated with examples gathered from primary sources of BrE and AmE. These six specimens of differences are checked in two ways. First, bring these differences into account, the thesis probes into the description of Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) to them and analyzes the reasons for its merits. Second, the thesis checks them against the Chinese-specific English-Chinese learners'dictionaries (ECLDs). Gaining the experience from the LDOCE and discovering the demerits of ECLDs, this thesis ensures the necessities of adding information on verbs'grammatical differences between BrE and AmE to ECLDs from the perspectives of grammar, pragmatics, lexicography and teaching methodology.Based on the above research, the thesis puts forward some suggestions for optimizing the verb's grammatical difference information in ECLDs from the perspectives of both the macrostructure and the microstructure of the dictionaries. On one hand, in terms of the macrostructure, suggestions include adding an article about English history and English main varieties to the font matter, the grammar page to the body and an irregular verb table to the appendices. On the other hand, taking the microstructure into account, the thesis suggests inserting the variety label and the usage column into the entry of headwords requiring an explanation, setting a two-way reference system between BrE and AmE headwords as well as presenting spoken language information in the dictionary.