| In recent years the compilation of Chinese learners-oriented dictionaries has received wide attention, while the language used for definition in these dictionaries still needs improvement. This thesis selects two learners-oriented dictionaries, Oxford Advanced Learners' English-Chinese Dictionary(the 7th edition) and the Commercial Press Learners' Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese, to conduct a contrastive and experimental study, attempting to analyze and compare the language structure of defining adjectives in these two dictionaries, decide how different definition language structures influence learners' understanding thus putting forward suggestions for optimized language structure of defining adjectives in Chinese learners' dictionaries.Through comparison and experiments, this thesis has got some major findings: 1)The most common language structure for defining adjectives in both dictionaries proved to be “(object)+description of traits”. More specifically, Chinese dictionary tends to use adjectives in terms of describing traits while in English dictionary, the structure “verb+object” is preferable. Chinese dictionary focuses more on objects, and antonyms are much more often seen; 2) Based on the results of the experiments,suggestions are made as follows: objects of traits should be employed only when necessary, so is the structure“……?”; Applying various language structures would beat simply using adjectives to define adjectives; On top of adopting simple and understandable words for definition, which greatly impacts learners' understanding,supplementary explanations could also be added to the definition.This thesis is innovative for it conducts the study within a targeted range in a systematic way; besides, it emphasizes empirical research, drawing conclusions from experimental results. Nevertheless, the language structure of only one certain type of words is investigated in this thesis, further study could be done on a wider basis. |
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