Systematically Describing Antonymy Of Collocational Dictionarie

Collocations in collocational dictionaries reveal a richness of semanticrelations, which are important in improving students’ learning ability. The previousstudies mainly focus on the importance of collocational dictionaries to learners, innerstructure of collocational dictionaries and appropriate policies to place collocates.There are scarce studies on antonymy treatment inside.Based on Lyons’ antonymy theory and Mettinger’s non-systemic oppositetheory, the present research project tries to take Oxford Collocations Dictionary forStudents of English (hereafter OCD) as an example to do the research. Samples areused to do a dictionary survey of OCD and a corpus survey of British NationalCorpus (hereafter BNC) respectively. Then a comparison is made between the resultsfrom two surveys. The main findings are as follows: the compilers of OCD havesome awareness to include antonymy in collocates, but there is some arbitrariness inthe including process; in the range of contents, the antonymy is undertreated in OCDand a lot of antonymous collocates in BNC are not included in OCD; in the ways ofpresenting, the usage symbols in OCD to indicate antonymous collocates are notused systemically. On the basis of the findings, the author suggests that collocationaldictionaries should include the antonymous collocates that corpus presents as manyas possible; and on the presenting ways, the usage symbols used to indicateantonymy should be standardized and systematized.