The Distribution Of Example Types In Advanced Learner's Dictionaries

This thesis proposes the distribution of example typology based on the systematic exemplification in English learner's dictionary.Illustrative examples are a crucial part in a learner's dictionary as they can provide foreign language learners with a language context which they can often resort to when they have some problems in learning.However,English learner's dictionaries treat examples in different ways in different dictionary families.Oral proficiency,particularly fluency,is always regarded as the ultimate goal to be achieved by all English learners.The distribution of spoken and written examples in LDOCE(Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English) is the main concern of this paper.The author firstly did some review on the former researches on illustrative examples to provide this thesis a general background.Then the author extracted some conversational,pragmatic,grammatical and lexical characteristics of spoken English to function as criteria to classify spoken and written examples which were from the randomly sampled headwords.Thirdly,the author conducted a case study on examples of "actually" in LDOCE2 and LDOCE3.Finally,an overall picture of example distribution was sketched based on an analysis of the same 100 sampled words in LDOCE2 and LDOCE3 respectively.Moreover,the example distribution of common words from the 40 randomly sampled words(from the 3000 most frequent words in spoken English marked in LDOCE3) in LDCOE2 and LDOCE3 respectively was also dealt with in this thesis.With regard to the importance of examples in a learner's dictionary and based on the COBUILD's Wordbank(Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary),the British National Corpus and Leech's frequency list of spoken and written English,various aspects of examples of the sampled words have been checked through comparisons between the second and third editions of LDOCE.The items that were compared involved the following types:sentence examples and discourse examples;authentic examples and invented examples;spoken examples and written examples.The distribution of spoken examples and written examples is the author's main concern in this thesis.As a result,some tendencies of example typology in a learner's dictionaries is revealed.From the experiment and analysis we can see that:firstly,there is a balanced and faithful distribution of spoken and written examples in LDOCE2 and LDOCE3 generally.Secondly,an obvious increase of spoken examples from LDOCE2 to LDOCE3 is detected.Thirdly,treatment of spoken and written examples of the most common words is obviously unbalanced in LDOCE3.Fourthly,because there is large-scale corpus as the reference to compile a dictionary,the distribution of spoken and written examples can be as faithfully as possible to reflect the language reality. Fifthly,it's a tendency to highlight the spoken part of English to fulfill users' requirements of oral proficiency in English advanced learner's dictionaries,and corpus will play a more and more important role in dictionary compiliation.