Categorization-based Definition Pattern Of Home Appliance Words In English Learner’s Dictionary

As the core of a dictionary, definition has been always arranged in alphabetical order in traditional dictionaries, which makes the semantic network of lexical items set apart and causes a lot of trouble to readers of these dictionaries. As one kind of new words, home appliance words, like other kinds of words, are separated and get a quite large amount of definition terms. Under this circumstance, those words which have close relations between each other are put into different places by their alphabetical sequence or phonetic sequence, which makes learners hard to find their connection and lower down learners’ efficiency and effect.In order to change this, we start from the view of categorization-based definition,using more humanistic way to rearrange the definition pattern of home appliance words. Categorization is the classification of things by the connections between them,certain conceptual category refers to a group of things which share similar characters,it is the representation of their common features, but at the same time, there exists some distinct features between category members(Zhang Yihyua 2015: 241). After understanding the mechanism of conceptual category’s formation, this research starts from the view of categorization, connects the referent and definition of home appliance words together, which is hoped to improve their definitions in dictionaries.In the present study, home appliance words in Big Fives are chosen as the research subjects, and they are classified into eight main categories: cooking appliance category, transmission & switch category, refrigerator category, audio &video category, lighting category, sanitary & hygiene category, air-condition category,information storage & transmit category. After the categorization, we discuss the construction of a category system which is based on lexical relations including meronymy, hyponymy, material-product relation, etc. Moreover, we lend some help from some lexical data resources which help us analyze the lexical relations between genres, such as the Word Net, Wikipedia, Chinese-English classified dictionary andEnglish-Chinese classified visual dictionary as well. Definitions of different genres of home appliances in present dictionaries are analyzed based on the category system.With the help of all these definitions in BIG 5 and the category system, the prototype of each category and the distinct features of each member in each category are extracted and compared with each other. Finally, a series of uniformed definition patterns will be brought forward, which may reflect both these features and help learners memorize and distinguish these words.This research is aiming to optimize the definition pattern in current English Learners’ Dictionaries, it is hoped that the effort of this research can promote the efficiency of learners’ cognition and save compilers’ time and effort as well.Furthermore, the category system based on categorization may be helpful in the field of machine readable dictionaries. Due to the limited ability and time, there may be certain limitations in the present study, and we hope the further study can make some improvement and progress in the near future.