The Comparative Study On POS Labeling In Chinese-English Dictionaries

POS labeling is deeply concerned with the macrostructure and microstructure of a dictionary. POS labeling in Chinese-English dictionaries, whose two core issues are why and how to do POS labeling, has experienced a tough but effective process, and it has absorbed rich nutrition from the POS labeling practice in Chinese dictionaries. POS labeling in Chinese dictionaries roughly develops from no consideration of POS labeling to label parts of the functional words then to label the monosyllable words and multi-syllable words on the basis of the distinction of words and non-words in Modern Chinese Dictionary (5th edition). Chinese-English bilingual dictionaries shares the similar POS labeling experience, from no clear POS labeling to part POS labeling and full POS labeling, among which New Century Chinese-English Dictionary (2003) have tries to mark all Chinese entries.In the first place, this thesis tries to answer the two core questions, why POS labeling so important and how to do POS labeling in dictionaries. On the one hand, it states the advantages of POS labeling mainly from its importance, necessity and possibility. On the other hand, it puts forward a series of basic questions about POS labeling of Chinese headwords in Chinese-English dictionaries, namely, the object and scope of POS labeling, the selection of POS system, the basis of POS labeling, and the principles of POS labeling.In the second place, the thesis briefly reviews the history and the present study of POS labeling, synchronically and diachronically, from the perspective of languages (both Chinese and English) and lexicography, to analyze the factors influencing the choice of POS labeling. Synchronically, the thesis firstly reviews the Chinese POS study from grammar research; and then it combs the citing scene of POS labeling history and different POS labeling in the representative Chinese dictionaries, English dictionaries and Chinese-English dictionaries, to show the different acceptance of POS labeling in different dictionaries. Diachronically, the thesis takes the POS labeling of New Century Chinese-English Dictionary (2003) as a case study, to present its advantages and disadvantages of POS labeling. To sum up, the factors influencing the choice of POS labeling include the differences between Chinese and English languages, the different function of different dictionaries, the help of corpus construction, and the application of newest achievement of applied linguistics.In the third place, this thesis does a comparative study on the POS labeling of the selected Chinese disyllabic words, focusing on putting forward suggestions concerning a relatively comprehensive, reasonable POS labeling. The thesis chooses representative, influential and typical dictionaries and entries. In dictionary selection, the XIANDAIHANYUCIDIAN (5th edition) and XIANDAI HANYU XUEXI CIDIAN are chosen from the Chinese dictionaries, and two kinds of Chinese-English dictionaries are selected, the POS unlabeled and POS labeled; in word selection, as is known to all that Chinese disyllabic words take the largest share in Chinese words, and nouns, verbs and adjectives take the largest share in Chinese parts of speech system, the thesis chooses the Chinese disyllabic words with at least two kinds of these parts of speech, taking the typicality of research objects into consideration. And finally the words chosen are理想(noun, adjective),实践(noun, verb),喜欢(adjective, verb), and可能(noun, adjective, verb,…). The comparative study distinctly shows the advantages and disadvantages of these POS labeling methods with a wealth of examples.In the last place, it concludes the main findings and existing problems of the thesis, and gives suggestions about the further study. The problems solved and to be solved relating to POS labeling are made clear at the end of the thesis, in order to perfect the theoretical system and compiling practice of POS labeling in Chinese-English dictionaries.