The Analysis Of Examples In Active Monolingual Chinese Foreign Learners' Dictionaries

A learner's dictionary, as the dictionary which is designed according to practical needs of language learners and teachers, is a crucial tool in language acquisition. Examples in a learner's dictionary are of great importance as they contain semantic information, syntactic patterns, grammatical and pragmatic usage of the headwords, and are valuable to language learners to help them encode tasks, such as production of texts. Active Chinese foreign learners'dictionaries have gradually caught scholars'attention. However, both the compiling practice and the theoretical construction of Chinese learner lexicography still remain in the preliminary stage of their development. Researchers focus on functions and types of the example, while concrete enquiries, such as what approach should be used and what principles should be obeyed to give examples, are hardly referred to.The importance of examples in learners'dictionaries and the immaturity of examples in Chinese foreign learners'dictionaries make the approach and the principle of exemplification the focus of my research. First, through literature review this thesis illustrates the necessity for learners'dictionaries to value grammatical information and the importance to use examples to present relevant language usage information. Secondly, with regard to achievement and weakness of treatment details, various aspects of examples, especially examples for verb, have been checked through comparisons between four typical active monolingual Chinese foreign learners'dictionaries and statistical analysis on the language corpora. The items that are compared include the number of examples, example types and grammatical information which the author chiefly focuses on.As a result, some practical rules of exemplification in Chinese foreign learners' dictionaries are suggested. A key pre-requisite for learners'dictionary development is large-scale Chinese computerized corpora, including text corpora and learner corpora. The most important rule of steps of exemplification, from determining the number and the type of examples to selecting appropriate sentence examples based on corpus, is to make the rank of grammatical function frequency clear. Finally, a tentative proposal on principles of exemplification is put forward for Chinese foreign learners'dictionary compilers.