On The Sense Ordering Of Prepositional Entries In English-Chinese Learners' Dictionaries:A Cognitive Perspective

Two converging factors have influenced the present research on the sense ordering of prepositional entries in English-Chinese learners' dictionaries:the expectations of the advanced Chinese EFL learners and the necessity and significance of drawing insights from the cognitive linguistics into bilingual lexicography.Relevant studies on the lexicographical treatment of prepositions in learners'dictionaries have been conducted abroad and at home such as Pedersen(1984),Swanepoel(1998),Yong and Chen(2001),Coffey(2006)and Arleta(2008).The present research,with its focus on the sense ordering of prepositional entries in ECLDs,attempts to deal with the sense ordering from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,due to the reason that relevant studies on the acquisition of prepositions have confirmed the usefulness of specifying the cognitive mechanism in prepositional meaning extension.The present author conducted three surveys,namely a questionnaire survey,a dictionary survey and a vocabulary test to collect necessary data.Based on the data collected from the questionnaire survey,the present author pinpointed the expectations of the advanced Chinese EFL learners for prepositional sense ordering in ECLDs:1)Sense ordering is expected to play an important role in revealing the derivative relations within the various senses of a preposition.2)Marking the primary sense of a preposition is considered as necessary since the primary sense,which rarely changes throughout the development of English language,is essential in meaning extension.3)Prepositional sense ordering should be designed to help dictionary users to improve the efficiency in locating the sense they are looking for.4)A guide word or a short cut is necessary for providing the essential meaning of a sense and to distinguish it from others.In addition,according to the dictionary survey,the author identified the status quo with the prepositional sense in current ECLDs,which were as follows:varying granularity in the division of senses,arbitrariness in the ordering of senses,mixture of independent senses,and disagreement over the primary sense and parts of speech of certain sense.In the following,the author tried to explore how to improve prepositional sense ordering in ECLDs based on the model of principled polysemy network(Tyler&Evans,2003).The rationality of adopting this model lies in that it can build a semantic network for prepositional entries and specify the cognitive mechanisms for dictionary users.The specific suggestions for improving prepositional sense ordering are as follows:1)The primary sense of a preposition should be determined based on the five principles proposed by Tyler and Evans;2)The distinct senses of a preposition should be determined based on the two criteria,i.e.a meaning element not purely spatial in nature and context-independency;3)Senses with derivative relations should be grouped together to explicitly reveal the semantic relations for dictionary users;4)A guide word as a summary of the meaning should be provided to help dictionary users locate the meaning they are looking for more efficiently.The results of the vocabulary test have proved that the revised sense ordering can indeed help dictionary users more satisfactorily.The study has important theoretical as well as practical implications.Theoretically speaking,the present research provides a new perspective on the sense ordering of prepositional entries in ECLDs,which broadens the theoretical exploration in lexicography.In practical terms,the present research offers helpful suggestions on how to better the sense ordering of prepositional entries in bilingual lexicography and meet the needs of the advanced Chinese EFL learners more satisfactorily.