On The Treatment Of Idiom Variations In Dictionaries Of English Idioms

The formation of the idiom has experienced a long history, and it is often stable in structure and meaning. However, speakers usually endow the idiom with new usages by replacing, adding, and deleting words or by altering the grammatical structure of the idiom, which leads to the appearance of idiom variation. The acquisition of idiom variation concerns the effectiveness and flexibility of idiom learning. The current dictionaries of English idioms(DOEI) mainly include the information about definition, example and cultural background. And the current studies on DOEI also focus on the treatment of these information. The limited studies on variation information mainly rest on the observation of individual cases. Scarce special lexicographical studies are made on the comprehensive study of treatment of variation information in DOEIs and the improvement on the treatment.Given this research situation, the thesis takes four current mainstream DOEIs as research objects. Based on the Theory of Norms and Exploitations(TNE), this thesis makes a dictionary survey to check the treatment of idiom variation of sample idioms. Also, it compares the practical usages of the sample idioms revealed by British National Corpus with the information on these idiom provided by the four DOEIs. The results suggest that: the surveyed dictionaries are arbitrary in including the information about substitutable words; the example is too limited to suggest variation usages of idioms; the variation of permutation type is mostly ignored and the inclusion of variation caused by regional difference is sporadic. The author suggests that DOEIs include substitutable words according to their frequencies in corpus; present more examples to suggest variation usages; pay more attention to permutation variation and apply corpora from both American English and British English to make a place labeling.