On The Treatment Of Prepositional Collocates In Collocation Dictionaries For Learners

Word combinations are very important in English learning, proficient mastery of collocations helps learners to express and communicate more fluently in both written spoken English. Therefore, collocations dictionary has always been an important type of dictionary on which applied linguists and dictionary makers focus. In spite of these scholars’ active exploration into the collocations dictionaries, few of them focus on the treatment of prepositional collocates. The present study intends to find out how prepositional collocates are treated in entries of nouns, verbs and adjectives in collocation dictionaries and, if problems exist, solutions will be proposed.In light of Frame semantics, the prepositional collocates in 90 sample entries of 30 nouns, 30 verbs and 30 adjectives in Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students(hereafter OCD) were surveyed and compared with the prepositional collocates of these words revealed by British National Corpus(hereafter BNC). The results show that the compilers of OCD have included prepositions in collocates, but in half of the sample entries many prepositional collocates with higher frequencies are missing; prepositional collocate of one individual headword is not exemplified; minor mistake is found in the exemplification of a prepositional collocate in rare cases. Based on these findings, the author suggests that prepositional collocates which have higher frequencies in BNC and are identified by Frame Net should be included in collocation dictionaries, meanwhile the absent examples of some prepositional collocates should be added.