Treatment Of Grammatical Information In Number Of English Nouns In ECLDs

The difficulty of Chinese EFL learners in acquiring English nouns is not the semantic meaning but the usage of the words. According to grammatical features, English nouns can be classified into countable nouns and uncountable nouns. However, there is no absolute boundary between countable nouns and uncountable nouns. Some nouns can be both countable and uncountable. Uncountable nouns even can be countable or in plural form. The inflection with regards to number of English nouns can influence syntactic features, collocations, and other usages of them and brings about the changes of semantic meanings. Therefore, number information is the difficult point for Chinese EFL learners to acquire English nouns.Taking Chinese EFL learners'special difficulties and needs as the starting point, this study tries to find out the underlying reasons of Chinese EFL learners'difficulties by comparing the differences in expressing number of nouns between the two languages based on transfer theory and markedness theory. Chinese and English belong to different language families, so they often have different forms of expression. Chinese has no definite grammatical category of number and has no number inflection. Plural meaning is often implied in the syntactic structure or in the context by bare noun. And plural meaning can also be expressed by the suffix"们", numerical adjectives such as many, numerous and each, quantifiers, and reduplications. The grammatical number of English nouns, however, is far more complicated than that of Chinese nouns. English nouns express number category by inflection as well as quantifiers at times. The difference in expressing number of nouns between Chinese and English is the main obstacle for Chinese EFL learners to acquire number of English nouns. In the study, several noun entries are selected as the representatives to be analyzed from the perspective of grammatical codes, definitions, examples, and user-friendly columns so that ECLDs can learn from the foreign ELDs to improve themselves.The study finds that Chinese ECLDs have the following problems in treating grammatical information of number of English nouns: lack of grammatical codes, examples or definitions, inconsistency between examples and grammatical codes or between the presentations of nouns of the same kind, etc. In this study, suggestions on presenting the grammatical information of number of English nouns are proposed in hopes of drawing lexicographers'attention in compiling ECLDs.