| Grammatical meaning refers to the meaning conveyed in a sentence by word order and other grammatical signals,while lexical meaning is the meaning conveyed at the word level.After entering syntactic structures,English verbs express various grammatical meanings,usually integrated with lexical meanings.Unfortunately,quite a few E-C dictionaries focus too much attention on only the lexical meaning of English verbs,to the neglect of their grammatical meanings.For some of these dictionaries,grammatical meanings of some verbs are manifested in their Chinese definitions;however,this way of definition has not been observed from start to finish.This is quite likely to give rise to difficulties of all kinds for the accurate understanding of English verb meanings on the part of Chinese learners of English.Because English trivalent verbs,which carry various grammatical meanings in specific syntax,are one of the word groups most likely to cause this kind of defect in the Chinese definitions of E-C dictionaries,this research mainly focus on English trivalent verbs to explore the practical methods for integrating lexical meaning and grammatical meaning in the Chinese definitions of English verbs in E-C dictionaries.For an effective observation of the meanings of English trivalent verbs,the research explores them from the perspective of thematic roles and argument structures.Thematic role is the semantic ‘slot' connected with syntactic structure,while argument structure refers to the number of entities in the relational predication at the lexical level.They interact with each other,making English verb meanings more complicated than one might think.Such complexity of the meanings of English trivalent verbs suggests,to a certain extent,the mapping of human beings' cognitive law to the syntactic structure of language.Generally speaking,the internal argument adjacent to the verb is most likely to be profiled.And the semantic ‘slot' in the position of profiled argument usually holds various thematic roles,resulting in different meanings of verbs,which have already contained grammatical meanings to a large extent.The supporting examples,collected from???????(2nd Edition)and Kingsoft Powerword,are classified into three types according to their semantic features.They are 1)MSD verbs(which were further divided into explicit and implicit MSD verbs);2)MSCS verbs;3)verbs of giving(which were further divided into verbs of change of possession and verbs of benefiting).The research reveals that the Chinese definitions of the above three types of English trivalent verbs can take the following forms,respectively: 1)For MSD verbs,the definition can take the form of “ lexical meaning +...;?...? + lexical meaning,lexical meaning + ?...?/? ”;2)For MSCS verbs,the form of “ lexical meaning+ ?...;?/?...+ lexical meaning + ? ”;3)For verbs of change of possession,the form of “ lexical meaning+…;lexical meaning + ?...,?...+ lexical meaning ” and for verbs of benefiting,the form of “ lexical meaning+...;?/?...+lexical meaning ”.That is to say,corresponding prepositions or prepositional phrases are usually added to lexical meanings of English words for the purpose of integrating lexical meaning and grammatical meaning in the Chinese definitions in E-C dictionaries.The major contribution of the research is a systematic identification,on the basis of thematic roles and argument structures,of the error-prone aspects of the Chinese definitions of English trivalent verbs,and also the advancement of corresponding solutions.It is hoped that the research can be of some practical value for the compilation and revision of E-C dictionaries.At the same time,it is also hoped to be helpful to English learners in China in their mastery of English verb meanings thoroughly from the perspective of both lexical meaning and grammatical meaning.From the theoretical point of view,the findings of the research have proved the conclusion that English and Chinese have different ways of lexicalization. |
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