Towards Better Treatment Of Prepositional Collocates Of Verbs In Collocation Dictionary For Learners

In the English language, the verb is the core of a sentence which determines the basic structure of the sentence. The verb’s combination with a preposition is its important use. Since prepositions themselves have complex meanings, the collocations between verbs and prepositions are one of the difficulties which Chinese learners of the English language encounter. English Collocation dictionaries are important resources for teaching and learning. However, the studies on this type of dictionary focus on their pedagogical importance, the internal structure of collocations, patterns of collocations, and editing policies for positioning collocates etc., and there are scarce studies on prepositional collocates of verbs.In this research project, in the light of Talmy’s Image Schema of Force Dynamics theory, a sampled survey was made in Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English (OCD) in order to analyze the treatment of prepositional collocates in verb entries. And the results show that:(1) The prepositional collocates provided by the dictionary are insufficient;(2) Neglecting the synonymous relations between prepositions leads to clustering semantically irrelevant prepositions;(3) Examples used to illustrate uses of prepositions are not enough. Then a corpus survey was made to investigate the frequencies of prepositional collocates of the sampled verbs, and the results show that:(1) Some high-frequency verbs are absent in the word list of OCD;(2) Some low-frequency prepositional collocates of a verb are included in the entry while high-frequency ones not. Finally, from the perspective of Talmy’s Image Schema of Force Dynamics theory, the author puts forward some suggestions to improve the inclusion and presentation of prepositional collocates in a verb entry.