A Diachronic Research On Pragmatic Information At Discourse Level In Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 4-8^th Editions

This research paper mainly conducts a diachronic study on the pragmatic information in discourse level in Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary(hereinafter OALD) from the fourth Edition to the eighth Edition. The dictionary has a long history of 62 years from the birth of the first edition in 1948 to the 8th edition in 2010. During this period, the number of headwords and information has been increased a lot.Recently, with the development of the theory and technique of lexicography, especially the rise of the corpus, the modern dictionary pays more attention to the actual demands of the English learners. Therefore, it is indispensable for a practical dictionary to contain pragmatic information especially when Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English(hereinafter LDOCE) makes the first attempt to ―incorporate pragmatic information into a dictionary for foreign learners of English‖, and a lot of valuable pragmatic information is presented by using various methods from word(phrase) level, sentence level, and discourse level. However, a dictionary lays its emphasis on the interpretation of the headwords, so it mainly focuses on the former two levels and neglects the latter one. In comparison, only a few dictionaries provide pragmatic information in discourse level and its presentation methods are also needed to be improved. Taking OALD as an example, it spares no effort to present the pragmatic information in discourse level since the 4th edition. According to the Research on Pragmatic Information in English-Chinese Learning Dictionary by Yang Wenxiu(2005), there are four methods to present pragmatic information in discourse level, that is, pragmatic information of topic, conversational structure, speech act and politeness principle. This paper takes it as the research framework, conducts a diachronic study form the above four aspects and tries to answer the following three research questions:① What pragmatic information in discourse level has been contained in OALD 4-8th editions? Which methods do they use to update it?② How has the presentation of pragmatic information been changed in the OALD 4-8th editions?③ Are there any shortcomings in terms of pragmatic information in discourse level in OALD 4-8th editions? If so, how can it be resolved?The results show that the pragmatic information in discourse level continuously inherits and innovates from the original edition in the dictionary, and has a progressive tendency in overall. At the same time, this research concludes that: the pragmatic information in discourse level in the dictionary(1) has a variety of presentation mode in form;(2) has undergone a process from the deficiency to the relative perfection in terms of content. However, there are several problems in terms of presentation of the pragmatic information in discourse level in OALD 4-8th editions, such as shortage of pragmatic information of topic, incompletion of pragmatic information of discourse markers and etc. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes that pragmatic column of Topic, Language Bank for discourse markers and etc. can be added to the dictionary, and hope that this sort of advice could be valuable and useful for the improvement of the presentation of pragmatic information in dictionary.