Towards A Corpus-based English-Chinese Dictionary Of Collocations

It is recognized that the majority of vocabulary consists of prefabricated chunks of different kinds. The present thesis is an attempt to explore the single most important chunk, collocation, i.e. the tendency of words to attract and repel each other. However, collocations are typically characterized as arbitrary, language- (dialect-) specific, recurrent in context, and common in technical language. It is difficult to determine what collocation is acceptable, but it is possible to observe collocations in samples of language. Thus, collocation acquisition falls within the general class of corpus-based approaches to language.A dictionary of collocations is a reference book specializing in providing collocational information in the most typical form in context. An up-to-date, corpus-based dictionary of collocations can be of great help for learners to acquire natural and idiomatic language.In the study of collocations, computer corpora are convenient tools, for they enable researchers to examine a large number of authentic data which have not been available before in a systematic manner. Statistical methods like frequency calculation, mutual information, Z-score, and Xtract, can be employed to guarantee the efficiency and accuracy of a corpus-based study of collocations when quantitative and qualitative analyses are combined. The corpus-based study of collocations covers areas like discovering collocations, meaning distinction of words through collocations, collocation and register, translating collocation, and the analysis of collocation errors, which may be beneficial to language teaching and learning, and dictionary making.The present author has taken major monolingual dictionaries of collocations and English-Chinese ones for case studies by way of comparison and contrast. It is found that English-Chinese dictionaries of collocations, in particular, have deficiencies in aspects like typicality and authenticity in example selection, grammatical and lexical collocations, the arrangement of collocations, translation and collocation errors. On the basis of corpus-based studies of collocations and case studies of English monolingual dictionaries of collocations, the present author has put forward some principles andmethods for improving English-Chinese dictionaries of collocations in terms of typicality and authenticity in example selection, user perspective and systematization in the treatment of entries, the updating of collocations, the arrangement of lexical collocations, register labels, collocational difference and translations, and help boxes for collocation errors.