On POS Labeling In Chinese-English General Dictionaries: A Cognitive Perspective

Chinese bilingual lexicography has yielded aboundant fruits both in theory and paractice in recent years. Impressive accomplishments have been achieved on English-Chinese bilingual lexicography. But Chinese-English dictionary compilation is awaiting progress and breakthrough. Although dozens of excellent Chinese-English dictionaries have been published since 1970s, the problem of utility has been the target of lexicographical criticism. One suggestion to improve the utility is the presentation of parts-of-speech (POS) indication in Chinese-English dictionaries. So POS labeling has attracted more and more attention from scholars.The recognition of parts of speech (POS) is the prerequisite of accurate translation of headwords in bilingual dictionaries. However, POS labeling is not as easy as labels of register in a Chinese-English dictionary. On the one hand, POS study is always a Gordian knot to Chinese linguists ever since the beginning of Modern Chinese Linguistics. Disputes exist both in theory and practical operation, such as the nature of POS, the strategies on multifunctionality and the definition of multi-category words. On the other hand, POS labeling in Chinese-English dictionaries is a longstanding and complicated problem, which matters greatly as a minor step may lead to major consequences. What's worse, present studies are weak-based, methodologically outdated, and there exist some disputes with regard to such major questions as the target of POS labeling, the principle of translation by POS, and the basis of POS labeling in Chinese-English dictionaries.This thesis starts from the theories of bilingual lexicography, reviews the history of Chinese-English dictionary compilation and proposes POS labeling is crucial to the breakthrough of the bottleneck in Chinese-English dictionary compilation. Then it takes an overview of the present POS studies in Chinese linguistics and introduces the prototypical categorization theory and decategorization theory, including grammatical metaphor in functional linguistics and conceptual metonymy in cognitive linguistics as its theoretical framework to explore the synchronic and diachronic features of POS categories. Based on these, the thesis discusses specific issues concerning POS labeling in Chinese-English general dictionary compilation from the cognitive perspective and gives positive answers. At last, it concludes some findings, for example, POS labeling should base on Chinese corpus instead of relying on the present Chinese dictionaries. Meanwhile, the thesis makes some suggestions on the future task.Therefore, the research is of both theoretical and practical significance in bilingual lexicographical study, especially C-E general dictionary compilation.