A Study Of Exemplification For The Antonymous Compounds Entries In Chinese-English Dictionaries

As an important component of the dictionary microstructure,exemplification is praised as“the flesh and blood of the dictionary”,which can reflect the information bearing capacity of the dictionary.The Chinese-English dictionary（C-E Dictionary）is an indispensable tool for Chinese EFL learners.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to explore the efficiency of exemplification in C-E dictionaries.Antonymous compounds refer to compounds composed of two monosyllabic morphemes with opposite meanings,such as“zuoyou”and“churu”,which belong to a relatively closed and special type of compound words,and are self-contained in the vocabulary system of modern Chinese and have great research value.Previous studies have mainly focused on the linguistic ontology of antonymous compounds,teaching Chinese as a foreign language,and comparative studies of languages.From the perspective of lexicology,few studies have been done;there is few case study of exemplification of antonymous compounds in C-E dictionaries.This paper combines relevance theory and theory of norms and exploitations,and selects 218 antonymous compounds as the research objects,which are included in all the three authoritative C-E dictionaries:New Century Chinese-English Dictionary(2^ndedition),New Age Chinese-English Dictionary(2^nd edition)and A Chinese-English Dictionary(3^rd edition).It examines the present situation of their exemplifications in the three C-E dictionaries.Through descriptive analysis and comparative study,we find that the exemplification of C-E dictionaries is relatively deficient in aspects of relevance,integrity,typicality and friendliness,specifically including the lack of relevance and consistency between sense and examples,insufficiency or superabundance of examples,the difficulties in the comprehension of examples and etc.Therefore,with the refraction pertain to the semantic features,syntactic structures and pragmatic patterns of antonymous compounds from the multiple contexts in the Chinese Modern Language Corpus,this paper sums up the normal and expanded usage of words,and thus puts forward optimization suggestions for the exemplification of antonymous compounds in C-E dictionaries.Based on the analysis model of large corpus,this study reveals the particularity of antonymous compounds and their exemplification problems in C-E dictionaries from the word formation and semantic levels,and integrates the relevance theory and theory of norms and exploitations so as to put forward a new exemplification model,which is conducive to deepening the exemplification research of antonymous compounds in C-E dictionaries and also has guiding significance for the compilation of C-E dictionaries.