A Study On Usage Dictionaries

Usage refers to how people customarily or habitually use constituents of language to express meaning, which includes accent, pronunciation, spelling, punctuation, words and idioms. It’s very important for English learners, for it is the norm and standard of one community that directs and even dominates the actual use of the language. The disparity between Chinese and English culture also poses particular challenge for Chinese learners, who are led astray by some traditional misconceptions of vocabulary learning. For students of intermediate and advanced level, usage is always "a lion in the way" or "a stumbling block" in the improvement of their English. Usage dictionaries can be very useful in solving those tricky usage problems, but learners at home seldom use them owing to the ignorance of this type of reference book, and studies on it are rare too.Facing with gap, this thesis will take Practical English Usage (OUP1984,1995, and2005) as an example in order to get a full view of dictionaries of usage in general and partly address the application of them in English teaching and learning. First and foremost, it discusses terms like usage, use, and grammar from different perspectives, and introduces the history, approaches and methods of usage dictionary compilation. Then, it makes a contrastive analysis on treatment of usage in three types of reference books—usage dictionaries, learner’s dictionaries and grammars—especially the categories of information included and the presentation of them. A detailed discussion on the micro-structure and macro-structure of the PEU follows so as to investigate the selection and design of different kinds of entries. The concluding part summarizes the factors that influence the application of usage dictionary and partly answer the question of integrated use of three reference books in English teaching and learning. Usage dictionary like PEU deals with all those uncertain, difficult and disputable problems at every level of English use, in which there are coverage of important grammatical points, explanation of a large number of common vocabulary problems and independent entries for stylistic questions.