The Representation Of Middle Verb Usages In Chinese Learner’s Dictionaries

In recent years, the study of middle construction has been a hot issue. It has got much attention home and abroad because of its special syntactic and semantic features. The study tended to be concentrated in Indo-European languages, but since 1989, it has been largely discussed by linguists in Chinese language. This construction belongs to an important grammatical phenomenon which exists in many languages. It is the product as a result of the interaction of semantics, syntax and lexicon. However, the existing research of Chinese middle construction focused on syntactic and semantic levels but is rarely related with lexicon. Lv Shuxiang(1992) points out the necessity to compare Chinese with other languages to understand the characteristics of Chinese. In English learner’s dictionaries, have the middle usages of English verbs been represented perfectly? What about Chinese dictionaries? Should the middle usages of Chinese verbs be represented in Chinese learner’s dictionaries? Are the existing Chinese learner’s dictionaries perfect? These issues are worthy of our concern. Under the guidance of Two-level Word Class Categorization in Analytic Languages, this thesis is intended to discuss middle usages of Chinese middle verbs from two levels, one in langue and the other in parole, on the basis of the view of CAS, TNE and UBT, together with the large balanced modern Chinese corpus and authoritative English and Chinese learner’s dictionaries. This thesis pays attention to the combination of quantitative research and qualitative research, in order to make a qualitative analysis and judgment based on the quantitative study. The study proves that the middle usage of some Chinese middle verbs can be abstracted in langue from the level of parole. According to the theory of Two-level Word Class Categorization, when a usage has been entrenched and conventionalized as a normal usage, it should be represented in lexicon of the communal language, namely in dictionaries. What’s more, the explicit characterization contributes to language acquisition. For foreign-oriented learner’s dictionaries, they are not only related with the logical issues but also the issue of language production. In order to facilitate language production of Chinese learners(especially the foreign language learners), a fine distinction of senses should be made. The English learner’s dictionary(i.e. OALD7) compiled based on a large-scale corpus has relatively complete information of middle usages, while Chinese dictionaries haven’t realized the problem. This has also led to the problems in Chinese-English dictionaries(Chinese learner’s dictionaries in the broad sense) which are compiled on the basis of Chinese learner’s dictionaries. The revision of the existing Chinese learner’s dictionaries is imminent.In short, this issue not only has important academic value, but also significant application value.