Studies In The Presentation Of Lexical Phrases With Pragmatic Information In The English Learners’ Dictionaries

The study of Lexical Phrases is a new research area of the phraseology. Language users will achieve some degree of native-like English Proficiency through acquiring the pragmatic information of lexical phrases. However the pragmatic value of Lexical Phrases is seldom understood by language learners, hence insufficient pragmatic information of Lexical Phrases is conveyed to learners in language teaching. The findings of Lexical Phrases’ study are applied to the SLA studies which could improve the language learners’ communicative competence. However learners’ dictionary as an important learning tool shows little concern about Lexical Phrases, which is confirmed by the author’s study of Lexical Phrases with pragmatic information in the four authoritative ELDs(OALD8, CCED5, MED2 and LDOCE5). Moreover the author also finds that Lexical Phrases are treated as common phrases and that none of the four ELDs show much concern about their pragmatic information and little pragmatic information of Lexical Phrases is provided. Under such circumstances, the author proposes that the ELDs should present Lexical Phrases with resonable pragmatic information.Considering the importance of Lexical Phrases in improving the pragmatic competence, the research of this paper will be carried out around three questions listed as follows. 1. How is the pragmatic competence of CELs after learning the Lexical Phrases by using ELD; 2. How is the performance of presenting the Lexical Phrases with pragmatic information in the four ELDs and how it affects the dictionary users’ learning of Lexical Phrases; 3. How to present Lexical Phrases with pragmatic information in the ELDs.To answer these questions, the author applies methodology of experimental study, contrastive study and theoretical analysis approach. From the result of the experimental study, the author finds that CELs fail in finishing the test paper with using ELDs, the cause involves two factors. On the one hand, most of the CELs pay little attention to the pragmatic meaning of Lexical Phrases. They treat the Lexical Phrases as common phrases and only focus on its compositional meaning. On the other hand, it is shown that all of the four ELDs provide insufficient pragmatic information of Lexical Phrases in the macrostructure and microstructure. Through the contrastive study it is found that there are merits and demerits of the four ELDs in presenting Lexical Phrases with pragmatic information. At last after analyzing the presentation of Lexical Phrases with pragmatic information in the ELDs in the framework of context theory, it is found that the way the four ELDs present the Lexical Phrases with pragmatic information cannot compose an explicit context, so that it makes the users fail in learning the Lexical Phrases with pragmatic information. Based on the context theory, the author postulates three principles of presenting Lexical Phrases with pragmatic information in the ELDs and then gives some suggestions on optimizing the presentation of pragmatic information of Lexical Phrases in ELDs.