A Study On The Exemplification In English-Chinese Learner’s Dictionaries

Example plays an indispensable role in dictionaries. One significant feature of learner’s dictionaries is to provide abundant examples to help users enhance understanding of semantic, grammatical, stylistic, and pragmatic information concerned with the word. Learner’s dictionary is designed to meet the needs of foreign English learners, which can also be called monolingual learner’s dictionary. In respond to the requirement of EFL learners, monolingual learner’s dictionaries are translated into bilingualized dictionaries. For Chinese EFL learners, besides these two kinds of dictionaries, there are also English-Chinese dictionaries, which are designed by Chinese lexicographers, for the purpose of providing a learner’s dictionary which is designed particularly for Chinese EFL learners.It’s beyond dispute that examples are significant for learner’s dictionaries. This thesis chooses the exemplification in E-C learner’s dictionaries as the object, because E-C learner’s dictionaries are particularly created for Chinese EFL learners, in spite of its deficiencies, it is expected to play a significant role in Chinese EFL learning, however, the exemplification is not paid enough attention by researchers. Thus this thesis conducts a study on the exemplification in E-C learner’s dictionaries, aiming at surveying the characteristics of exemplification in E-C learner’s dictionaries, revealing its shortcomings through an empirical study, and then putting forward implications for improvement.This study selects three E-C learner’s dictionaries as the objects of the research: NECD4, NAECD4, and MECD3. These three dictionaries are published almost simultaneously, that’s why they are selected as the objects of this study. Being restricted by time and tools, four words are selected as research objects. These four words represent four word classes respectively, namely,"at" for prepositions,"big" for adjectives,"dog" for nouns, and "play" for verbs. In addition,OALECD7, as a bilingualized dictionary, is selected for the comparative study between the translation of learner’s dictionary and E-C learner’s dictionary. Through a data analysis and a specific analysis of examples under four headwords, it’s found that the exemplification in E-C learner’s dictionaries may be enhanced by dealing with the following problems. First, the source of examples is implicit; second, the example translation is deficient; third, the arrangement of examples is inconsistent; fourth, grammatical, pragmatic, stylistic and cultural information are insufficient; at last, theoretical guidance on exemplification is needed. In order to tackle these problems and enhance the exemplification, implications are put forward.