A Study Of Heterosemy Representation Strategies In The American Heritage Dictionary Of The English Language (5^th Ed.)

Word class categorization has been a dilemma in grammatical studies and the study of word classes has been treated as “the God particles” of language at the 36 th Annual Conference of German Linguistic Society. Since the classic word class categorization theories are mainly based on synthetic languages, which are characteristic of words with inflections. There doesn't exist any proper criteria to define the words with multiple classes in analytic languages. Then, the question that these words in analytic languages should be treated as heterosemy or just a temporary usage still remains to arrive agreements among lexicographers. As a representative in analytic languages, scholars have drawn different conclusions about the existence and quantity of multi-category words in modern English. But the previous studies on heterosemy in modern English either lack details or have no accurate statics about the type and numbers of multi-category words in Modern English. And previous studies have deficiencies in methodology. Wang Renqiang(2014) has conducted an empirical study on Oxford Advanced Learners' Dictionary(7th edition), which is a typical learner's dictionary to investigate the heterosemy in Modern English. However, there is no one having studied this issue in a native dictionary. Thus, based on the Two-level Word Class Categorization proposed by Wang Renqiang(2014), combining the Theory of Norms(2013) and Usage-based Theory(2010), this thesis aims to conduct an empirical study of heterosemy representation in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language(5th edition)(hereinafter shorted as AHD-5) in an attempt to deepen the understanding on the word class problems in analytic languages and provide implications for Chinese dictionary compilation.The results show that there are 10238 multi-category words in the AHD-5 accounting for 9.81% of all labeled words. The findings in AHD-5 suggest that there are a large number and variety of multi-category words in Modern English. Since multiple class membership is characteristic of analytic languages, the case in Chinese should be as the same in English. However, the prevailing Chinese dictionaries haven't treat multi-category words in a right way. That's because Chinese dictionaries compilers overly follow the “parsimony principle” and fail to understand word-class categorization from both syntactic and lexical levels.It is found that multiple class membership is characteristic of analytic languages and there are a large number and variety of multi-category words in Modern English.Based on the perspective of two-level word class categorization in analytic languages, this thesis has conducted a systematic and empirical study on multiple category words in the AHD-5 and collected these words. Therefore, this thesis has not only been helpful to deepen the study of multi-category words but also provided implications for Chinese word class categorization studies to improve the accuracy of Chinese dictionaries compilation.