Systematic Incorporation Of Cultural Information Into English-Chinese Learner's Dictionaries

This thesis proposes the necessity to systematically incorporate cultural information into English Chinese learner's dictionaries (ECLDs). That is to say, cultural information should be introduced in a systematic way to act as the background for the representation of meaning in ECLDs rather than being merely conveyed implicitly or presented by means of "glosses"or "labels"for the so-called "culture-specific"words as practiced in traditional dictionaries. The proposition is derived from the careful analysis of the inherent relationship between language and culture. It reveals that every word is culture-loaded~ different languages represent different notional systems; "culture-specificity"is a matter of degree; and lexical meaning can be "profiled"against cultural cognitive domains. As the final realization of the incorporation of "cultural information system"into ECLDs would be an enormous systematic project and is beyond the scope of the present study, only a tentative proposal is made and some provisional solutions are suggested or recommended in this thesis. That is to construct "cultural local networks"in ECLDs.