The Cognitive Optimization Of Adverbial Particles In LDs

This thesis aims at helping foreign learners of English to master adverbial particles and the meanings of phrasal verbs. It has explored three problems: (1) the cognitive analysis of the senses of adverbial particles; (2) a comparison of the treatment of the entries of adverbial particles in the mainstream monolingual English learner's dictionaries; (3) tentative solutions to optimize the entries of adverbial particles in monolingual English learner's dictionaries.The cognitive semantic analysis of adverbial particles has revealed that spatial senses of adverbial particles have contributed to their metaphorical ones.The comparison of the treatment of the entries of adverbial particles in Big Five has shown that: (1) the sense relations of a polysemous adverbial particle are cut away due to the frequency ordering and elaborate sense division; (2) some definitions are not precise; (3) illustrative examples are inadequate to meet the learners' productive needs; (4) the contributions of the senses of adverbial particles to understanding phrasal verbs are totally ignored.To solve the above problems, a general principle of cognitive perspective and three solutions to optimize the entries of adverbial particles have been proposed. According to this principle, the optimization should follow the learners' cognitive rules of learning a foreign language. The three solutions are: (1) setting up the section of Study Pages, which supply general guidance on learning adverbial particles; (2) establishing Usage Notes, in which collocations of common verbs with adverbial particles or their other particular uses are provided; (3) using Cross-references, which direct learners towards the corresponding verbs or phrasal verbs.