Exemplifications Of Verbs' Grammatical Information In English-Chinese Learner's Dictionaries

ECLD is a very important learning tool for Chinese EFL learners.During the process of the LD compiling,the treatment of grammatical information plays an essential role,and has earned more attention and effort from the compilers compared to other parts of the dictionaries.Verbs occupy a core position in the sentence structure,and the exemplification system is an effective way for users of ECLDs searching for grammatical information.Hence,the present study focuses on exemplifications of verbs' grammatical information in ECLDs.A questionnaire was conducted to investigate Chinese EFL learners' use of present ECLDs and the information they can get from ECLDs when looking up verbs in dictionaries.According to the survey,dictionaries are important tools for Chinese EFL learners.Students mainly use dictionaries in the tasks of encoding such as translation and writing.They take grammatical patterns as well as collocations as quite useful information for their encoding activities.In addition,students hold that examples are the most efficient way to present grammatical information of verbs.Based on the contrastive analysis of exemplifications of verbs' grammatical information in three ECLDs and two leading ELDs,this paper reveals that the work done in current ECLDs is far from satisfactory in the treatment of exemplifications of verbs' grammatical information.There are at least two problems with current ECLDs: a) absence of exemplifying verb patterns,and b) insufficiency in exemplifying verbs' typical collocations.The study bases its theoretical framework on Frame Semantics,according to which a complete description of a verb must include information about its grammatical properties and the various patterns in which it occurs.Therefore, grammatical information like context,verb patterns,phrasal verbs,and syntactic constructions can all be represented by means of the frame description.This thesis concludes that verb exemplifications should be theoretically based on Frame Semantics so that the typical grammatical information of verbs can be fully presented in examples.The thesis,based on the findings of the present research and other relevant studies,proposes a tentative model for exemplifications of verbs' grammatical information in ECLDs for Chinese EFL learners.There are three distinctive features in model entries.Firstly,guidewords which indicate the meaning of frame descriptions are put ahead of the equivalents.Secondly,examples are also constructed both at its minimum and maximum levels.Lastly,examples are constructed on the basis of valence structures in FN.