Research On The Compound Structure Of Compound Nouns In English And Chinese Learning Dictionaries Based On User 's Perspective

Compounds, omnipresent in the English vocabulary, are increasing steadily. They are not only a hot topic in the linguistics circle but a difficult issue in the lexicography. The compound noun as a subcategory, is the largest subgrouping of compounds. Its ubiquity and complexity have attracted many scholars mainly in research of its causes, types, forms, pronunciation and meanings etc. for long. However, its representations in the dictionaries are rarely involved. Although the type of vocabulary that are important to the learners make up an indispensible part in the English-Chinese Learners’ Dictionaries(ECLDs), yet their features such as high productivity make them an unpopular subject to lexicographers. Therefore, this paper attempts to improve the representation model of compound nouns(CNs for short), at the micro level in ECLDs with theoretical argument and empirical studies from the user perspective.This study will make the user perspective as the starting point with the communicative theory and the function theory of lexicography integrated. First, two ECLDs will be chosen and samples that are abstracted from them will have a comparison from the microstructure constituents in order to find some problems about these CNs. Second, eight of them will be verified in BNC, COCA and Web Corp from their production because of their serious insufficiency in information or different treatment in the two ECLDs. At last, based on their treatment in ECLDs and production in the two corpora and Webcorp, this paper will make an further optimization of the representation model of them at the microstructure in ECLDs from the user perspective.In the study, we find that there exist some problems such as inconsistency in POS labeling, disorder in definition, absence in examples etc. in the two ECLDs and this calls for the refinement of the representation model about CNs at the micro level in ECLDs. Thus, this paper brings forward they should comply with the Gestalt principle, the integration principle, the relevance principle, the equivalence principle and the economic principle on their representation at the microstructure and they can be provided with the methodological support of corpus-based pattern analysis.This study gives some suggestions about the representation of CNs at the microstructure in ECLDs. It can not only help deepen the linguistic study of them, butalso offer the important reference value for their treatment in dictionary compilation to some extent.