A Study Of The Systematic Representation Of Metaphorical Information Of Animal Entries In Learner’s Dictionaries

The learner’s dictionary is one of the learning tools for foreign language learners,which helps to solve the difficulties in language learning.Students may be influenced by the systematic representation of metaphorical information in learner’s dictionaries to some extent.This thesis selects eight dictionaries(seven learner’s dictionaries and one non-ESL dictionary)as examples to study the systematic representation of metaphorical information of animal entries from the point of microstructure,based on the paradigm of cognitive lexicography.It chooses the animal Long in Chinese and Dragon in English as a case to study.The preliminary findings are incomplete senses of entries,the mismatch of senses of entries between Chinese and English,the mismatch of pictorial illustrations,inaccurate collations,and the deficiency of identifications by text analysis of learner’s dictionaries.Firstly,according to this situation,this thesis analyzes National Language Commission’s Universal Parallel Corpus of Contemporary Chinese(CNC)and British National Corpus(BNC),attempting to know the usage of conceptual metaphor of Long/Dragon in different contexts,which helps the compilation of collations and illustrative examples in learner’s dictionaries.Secondly,by comparative corpus analysis,this thesis aims to find out the similarities and differences of conceptual metaphor between Long and Dragon.Next,dictionary-users are asked to fill in a questionnaire to know what dictionary-users truly think of systematic representation of metaphorical information in a learner’s dictionary.Lastly,the interviews of both students and teachers helps to know their views of learning and teaching metaphor with the help of learner’s dictionaries.The findings are as follows:(1)There are drawbacks in the representation of metaphorical information of animal entries,such as the sense of entry,the order of entry,the identification,the pictorial illustrations,the illustrative examples and so on;(2)The conceptual metaphor of Chinese Long and Western Dragon differ a lot due to the influence of cultural traditions,religious beliefs,historical customs and other factors,so Chinese Long cannot be equated with Western Dragon;(3)Different people have different ideas upon the representation of metaphorical information in learner’s dictionaries,but they admit the importance of metaphorical information and expect to see the cultural differences in learner’s dictionaries.All in all,this thesis is of great importance,because it guides lexicographers to compile the representation of related metaphorical information of animal entries;it offers suggestions to learning and teaching metaphors;it also inspires related translation studies;and it facilitates the cross-cultural communications and avoids cultural traps.