Towards A User-oriented Design For Grammatical Information Of Verbs In English

The importance of grammatical information in English-Chinese Learners' dictionaries has been recognized by lexicographers since a long time ago. However, little research on grammatical information from user perspective has been done. Therefore, this thesis, from the user perspective, studies the reference needs, skills and look up processes when the users consult grammatical information of verbs in ECLDs through a thinking-aloud experiment.Through the experiment, this thesis concludes that dictionary users paid much attention to grammatical information of transitivity of verbs, grammatical collocation, etc. But grammatical information of context and syntactic patterns of sentences were neglected by most of them. Their consultation skills were determined to a large extent by their understanding of grammatical knowledge. And a particular look-up process for grammatical information of verbs was shaped on the basis of their look-up strategies taken.This thesis also discusses the use of frame semantics in lexicography. Through the argumentation, this thesis concludes that frame principles and descriptions can be used to represent grammatical information of verbs through a highly-centralized management. Grammatical information like context, collocation and syntactic construction can all be represented by means of the frame description.At last, based on the research results of the thinking-aloud experiment as well as frame semantics, a user-oriented model for grammatical information of verbs inECLDs is established, which centers on frame descriptions and is supported by labels, notes and examples.