On The Treatment Of Linking Adverbials In Advanced English Learner’s Dictionaries For Chinese EFL Learners

Linking adverbials are important cohesive devices for language comprehension and production.Previous studies reveal that it is always problematic for learners to use this group of words,which pinpoints the necessity of their careful treatment in English learner’s dictionaries.However,they have been and are being neglected by lexicographers.Not much has been said about how to treat them in the dictionary.Survey of six English learner’s dictionaries reveals that the treatment of this group of words is characterized as being inadequate,insufficient,unsystematic and even misleading.The explanatory technique,be it paraphrase,synonym-type explanation,usage-based explanation,or full-sentence explanation,is always not able to show directly the meaning of these words and other information about meaning also needs improving.Corpus studies which provide evidence for what kind of information should go into the dictionary are mainly conducted quantitatively,thus cannot reflect the actual use of language by learners.In the circumstances,it is necessary that some other explanatory techniques be adopted and corpus studies,both quantitative and qualitative,be conducted to provide sufficient evidence for what kind of information should go into the dictionary.Specifically,this study aims to answer the following questions:(1)What kind of explanatory technique can present the definition of an individual linking adverbial explicitly?(2)What kinds of information about linking adverbials are necessary for learner’s dictionaries for Chinese EFL learners?(3)How can the information categories be accommodated and presented systematically in learner’s dictionaries?(4)How effective is the new explanatory technique for linking adverbials compared with the previous ones?Within the coherence theory framework,linking adverbials can be categorized according to the logico-semantic relations indicated.They are understood as explicit markers of the coherence relations between one proposition and another.A FrameNet-based treatment dovetails with the coherence-based approach to present the lexicographic information of linking adverbials,in which each category of linking adverbials is treated as a frame and individual linking adverbials are treated as frame evokers.Methodologically,a corpus-based approach and a contrastive interlanguage analysis were adopted to investigate the usage patterns of linking adverbials by the natives and the learners,thus to provide evidence for the explanation and other dictionary information categories.An empirical study was conducted to test the effectiveness of the explanatory technique.Findings pertinent to the four research questions are summarized in the following paragraphs.Individual linking adverbials can be explained by describing the relations between abstract propositions,which can be summarized as propositional frames.Explanations of individual linking adverbials in the form of propositional frames are provided after an examination of BNC concordance lines.The use of linking adverbials by Chinese learners,exemplified by WECCL,are explored both quantitatively and qualitatively in contrast with that in BNC academic section in terms of form,meaning,frequency,position,and register.It reveals that Chinese learners differ a lot from native speakers in these aspects,which means that the information goes into the dictionary for each LA should at least include syntactic patterns,frequency,register,position,discrimination between synonymous ones,and possible misuses.To accommodate all the information and present it systematically,a FrameNet treatment is adopted,in which each category of linking adverbials is treated as a frame and each subcategory a sub-frame.The relations between categories are treated as frame-to-frame relations.Individual linking adverbials are treated as frame evokers.The explanation of their meanings comes in the form of propositional frames,which also discriminates between synonymous ones.The examples should reflect the syntactic patterns of frame elements.Position,register,frequency,and possible errors should be explicitly indicated.The effectiveness of the propositional frame type of definition was tested empirically.It was found that the new type of definition had the same effect on students’ productive use of this group of words as the other two styles.Though the participants encountered some difficulties with this new type of explanation,it gained acceptance.The present study has proved that descriptions of the propositional frames can serve as explanations of linking adverbials.A FrameNet treatment together with propositional frames is an effective method to describe the meanings of linking adverbials and show their usage directly.A FrameNet treatment focuses on dictionary entries and proposes a multimodal presentation of dictionary information,which dovetails the requirements of media convergence dictionaries.It can also be taken as a supplement to FrameNet.The findings of this dissertation are expected to inspire lexicographical studies and second language teaching.