A Design Of The English Learner's Collocation Dictionary

Collocations, as an important part of linguistic research, have been deeply studied by both linguists and lexicographers. As for foreign language learning, one's competence of collocations, to some extent, is also an important indicator of what one's linguistic proficiency is.Collocation dictionaries, as carriers for collocations, play a significant role in the process of foreign language acquisition by providing excellent assistance to learners. However, existing collocations dictionaries are of varying quality, which may undermine the authority of such dictionaries.In this thesis the author takes a critical perspective over present collocation dictionaries, DEC and DCEC, and comments on the structure of the collocation dictionaries and systematic treatment of collocations, which can be an important help to the design of a learner's collocation dictionary. The author also studies Chinese English learners' linguistic behavior based on the statistic data of CLEC, only to find that those learners perform poorly in terms of collocation usage.Therefore, the author thinks that it is a necessity to create a collocation dictionary that adapts to users' need, and proposes to compile an English Learner's Collocation Dictionary (ELCD) which incorporates features of both collocation dictionaries and general- purpose learner's dictionaries.The author has reviewed the definitions of collocation by both linguists and lexicographers, and categorized collocations based on semantic, syntactic and co-occurrence rules. Meanwhile the author has tried to establish his own definition and made a classification of collocations so as to serve the design of ELCD. Lexical and grammatical collocation, most restricted collocation and generally restricted collocation, etc., are elaborated in this part. The nature of the collocation can be seen from its compositionality, institutionality and frozenness, and the structure framework of base and collocate. In view of the unscientific nature of present collocation dictionaries in terms of collocation selection and insufficient usage information, the author has conducted error analysis of "learn", "make" and "success" with the assistance of TANGO and CLEC, and probed the possible causes of those collocation errors. In this analysis the author has found that most of those errors resulted from mother tongue interference and that Chinese learners are difficult in dealing with culture-related collocations, which can provide the design of ELCD with first hand information about what dictionary users need.The author maintains that a user perspective study should be taken by dictionary compilers so as to facilitate the dictionary design. By referring to Hartmann's categorization of dictionary structure into 6 levels, that is megastructure, microstructure, mediostructure, access structure, and distribution structure, the author has built up at each level a detailed principle as a guide for designing the ELCD. The design of ELCD is intended to be an incorporation of general purpose learner's dictionary and collocation dictionary by employing scientific tools such as corpora to realize its scientificality in terms of the selection of collocations, usage information, judgment of collocations' register, etc.