A Comparative Study Of Definition Methods And Language Of Verbs

As studies of Chinese language have been developed over times, researchers begin to explore the field of Chinese Learners Dictionary in recent decades. This thesis is a comparative study of The Commercial Press Learners’ Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese and Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, which are two representative learners-oriented dictionaries in their languages. This thesis aims to find out the differences between these two dictionaries when explaining verbs, which could contribute to further study of learners-oriented dictionary, especially in Chinese. Methods of definition and descriptive languages in these two dictionaries are investigated and analyzed based on lexicographic theories and existing related findings.This thesis gets some findings after a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis as below: 1) both dictionaries use descriptive definition most, but Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English applies sentence definition method while The Commercial Press Learners’ Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese uses synonyms as a definition method; 2) these two dictionaries have different focuses when defining verbs, The Commercial Press Learners’ Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese focuses on descriptions of objects related to actions, while Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English emphasizes reasons and conditions of actions; 3) Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English has a clearer semantic structure in its definition language. The author suggests that Chinese learners-oriented dictionaries could try to apply sentence definition method when defining words and to structurize its definition language.This thesis is innovative when comparing and analyzing definition patterns and sentence structures of two learners-oriented dictionaries in different languages. The author’s effort of extracting definition patterns of verbs would contribute to development of studies in Chinese learners-oriented dictionaries, but the results are still suspending due to limited amount of verbs involved in this thesis, as well as types of them. Further study is hoped to be done on a more practical and convincible theoretical basis.