Improving The Treatment Of Compound Nouns In Collocational Dictionaries

The collocational knowledge of words is an important aspect for English learnersto grasp. Over the years, linguists have been constantly doing research on collocationand compiled specialized collocation dictionaries for language learners, which are ofmuch practical use for the understanding and mastery of words’ collocation.Compound words, as an important kind of word formation, are playing a significantrole in English vocabulary and have been the research target for linguists and scholarsbecause of their activeness and uniqueness. With the appearance of various new words,the appearance and use of new compound words have highlighted their importance.One of the important aspects of learning words is to learn its collocation. Therefore,learning the collocational knowledge of compound words is an important task thatlearners should face. However, in today’s collocational policies, they only putemphasis on single words’ collocation. And the previous research on compound wordsis centered around their formation, pronunciation，behavior of compounded words,semantics and classification, nobody has surveyed the treatment of compound wordsin collocational dictionaries in terms of their characteristics.Among all the types of compound words, compound nouns have always been thefocus of research being the most numerous and complex in their meaning. Thisresearch takes The Compounding and Hyphenation of English Words as reference andchooses some compound nouns from the solid form compound nouns list and openform compound nouns list to carry out the surveys. In order to make sure the wordschosen which are commonly used, the research also takes the five advanced learnersdictionaries as reference for their large vocabulary, namely, Oxford Advanced EnglishLearner’s Dictionary (7thedition), Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (4thedition), and Macmillan Dictionary for Advanced Learners (1stEdition) and CollinsCOBUILD Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (5th Edition), Cambridge AdvancedLearner’s Dictionary (1stEdition). Based on the characteristics of compound nounsand combined the corpus survey, the survey contents in the Oxford Collocational Dictionary for Students of English include:(1) the written form of compound nouns;(2) the placement of compound nouns in collocation dictionary;(3) the collocates ofcompound nouns.The survey results show that:(1) the component parts of some solid formcompound nouns have been broken as single words and treated as the collocates oftheir partner;(2) the placement of compound nouns has not followed Hausmann’s thecompiling policy that in noun+noun collocations, the second noun is the base;(3)compound nouns have not been treated as single words and given their own collocates.The survey results reveal that compound nouns have not been given their owncollocates to follow their own characteristics, but have been treated the same as singlewords’ collocates. In respect of the above problems, new sample entries will be givenfor compound nouns in collocational dictionaries.This research can not only help propose new treatment polices for compounds’treatment in collocational dictionaries, but also be of importance for vocabularyteaching and learning.