Improving The Treatment Of Adverbial Collocates Of Adjectives In Large-size English Collocation Dictionaries

English adjectives occupy an important position in learning English as a second language. They have unique features and syntactic functions, and adverbial collocates are an important part of the usage of adjectives. Collocation dictionaries for learners are important tools for English learning. In spite of many scholars' active exploration into collocation dictionaries, few of them focus on the treatment of adverbial collocates of adjectival entries. The present study intends to find out how the adverbial collocates of adjectives are treated in large-size collocation dictionaries from the perspective of semantic categories, and if problems exist, solutions will be offered.In light of frame semantics, the present author took a sample of 18 adjectives, drew on the adverbs of sampled adjectives identified in FrameNet and the adverbs of sampled adjectives revealed in British National Corpus, and analyzed the treatment of adverbial collocates of the 18 adjectives in The Kenkyusha Dictionary of English Collocation. The analytical results suggest that most adjectives are provided with adverbial collocates in KDE, but there exist some problems with the quantity, quality and presentation of the adverbial collocates provided in KDE:(1) The adverbial collocates are not sufficient;(2) Semantic categories of the adverbial collocates provided in KDE are not complete;(3) Polysemous adverbial collocates are not treated comprehensively;(4) Some adverbial collocates of different semantic categories are mistakenly put in one group and presented in one example;(5) Members of the semantic categories identified by KDE are not relatively complete;(6) Some adverbial collocates of the same semantic category are presented more than once;(7) The policy of semantic classification is not applied consistently within the same entry;(8) Sentence examples are overused, which occupies much space. Based on these findings, the author put forward a set of suggestions for improving the adverbial collocates of adjectival entries in KDE, and provided a sample entry the adverbial collocates of which were improved according to the suggestions.