Toward Prototypical Exemplification In English Dictionaries For Chinese EFL Learners

The dissertation addresses the following questions: (1) What factors affect exemplification in an English learners' dictionary? (2) How do these factors affect the selection and presentation of a prototypical example? and (3) What strategies should lexicographers adopt to ensure that a chosen example is prototypical?The factors which affect dictionary exemplification can be identified within a framework of example as discourse. At least five factors were found to have impacts on dictionary exemplification, viz., the lexicographical intentions behind an example, the linguistic information in an example, the source text of an example, the dictionary text that an example fits in, and the acceptability of an example to a particular group of users. Hence, a prototypical example must satisfy the criteria of intentionality, informativity, cohesion and acceptability.A prototypical example is always imbued with lexicographical intentions. Manifestation of clear lexicographical intentions in an example largely depends on whether lexicographers have correctly perceived the situation in which a particular group of dictionary users are most likely to look up a target word, and whether lexicographers have realized that an example intended for a decoding task fulfills different functions from an example for an encoding purpose.In terms of informativity of an illustrative example, lexicographers have to consider the application of corpus tools to exemplification and the implications of relevant linguistic theories for exemplification. Some efficient concordances, such as WordSmith, Word Sketch Engine and FrameNet, can be directly used to extract typical examples from a corpus. An informative example normally shows the semantic, combinatory and/or syntactic information of a target word. Frame semantics, which illuminates the prototypical frame and frame elements of a lexical unit, has some bearing on the presentation of semantic information in an example. Relevant phraseological studies throw light on the collocational information in an example. And some rules of valence theory and of syntactic alternation theory impose some syntactic constraints on the choice of an example.