A Study On The Multidimensional Representation Of Collocations In English-Chinese Learner’s Dictionaries

The use of collocations plays an important role in fluent and idiomatic English output,however,collocation acquisition is a big challenge for second language learners.The present study will carry out a corpus-based analysis on cognitive motivations to discover underlying cognitive factors of collocations to help Chinese EFL learners acquire collocations better.Then some deficiencies of current mainstream Learner’s Dictionaries in treating collocational information are uncovered according to learners’ needs for collocation acquisition,which aims to propose the suggestion of multidimensional cognitive representation of collocations.Ten high-frequency words that Chinese EFL learners have difficulties in acquiring within four different word classes,including verb,noun,adjective and adverb are selected.Verb-noun,adjective-noun and adverb-adjective collocations are retrieved with BNC corpus,then cognitive semantic analysis of collocations is undertaken under the guidance of Conceptual Metaphor Theory.The research findings show that there are different cognitive motivations of collocations,including metaphorical motivation,semantic motivation and the influence of semantic prosody.Especially metaphor provides an important explanation for the way words collocate.Chinese EFL learners’ collocation productions are examined with the aid of learner corpus CLEC to discover whether they have acquired cognitive motivations of collocations to produce collocations.The results show that Chinese learners have difficulties in collocation productions.Some collocation errors and unidiomatic collocation usage originate from learners’ incompetence in cognitive motivations of collocations,such as lack of systematical metaphor knowledge,confusion of core meaning of semantically-related words and unawareness of semantic prosody.Five current mainstream Learner’s Dictionaries are investigated to find out whether they can meet Chinese EFL learners’ specific needs of collocation acquisition especially in term of learners’ incompetence in cognitive motivations of collocations.The research findings show that cognitive factors of collocations are ignored in the dictionaries,such as lack of metaphor information in collocation box,displacement of collocations in the different cognitive domains.The present study attempts to suggest multidimensional cognitive representation of collocations under the guidance of Meaning-driven Multidimensional Definition Theory and Notice Hypothesis Theory in consideration of deficiencies of collocational representation in current Learner’s Dictionaries.According to different principles and methods of multidimensional cognitive representation,model of multidimensional cognitive representation of collocations is proposed and some sample entries are provided.The present study aims to optimize collocational representation in English-Chinese Learner’s Dictionaries from the perspective of cognition so as to better meet Chinese EFL learners’ needs of collocation acquisition.