A Study Of Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary

The thesis mainly researches the Chinese-English Dictionary compiled by Robert Henry Mathews(1877-1970),an Australian missionary.The Chinese-English Dictionary has been reprinted 10 times since its first edition in 1931.Especially during the world war ?,Yuanren Chao in person carried on the revision,making the dictionary to give a bright light again.It has served a useful purpose in the anti-fascist war and many students of Chinese,no matter militant or civilian,acknowledge their indebtedness to it.Zhou Youguang gives a high evaluation of it——the fourth milestone in Chinese-English bilingual dictionary in history.However,such a dictionary remains little known to domestic and foreign scholars.Even the basic information,such as nationality of the author is incorrect.There are no articles or thesis introduced the dictionary.So I choose Mathews' Chinese-English dictionary as subject,to introduce Mathews and his dictionary and to find out its lexical characters from its macrostructure and microstructure and its innovation of the blueprint and Yuanren Chao's revision.Through this research,we will observe how it facilitate western learners in learn Chinese and to evaluate the dictionary in the history of Chinese-English dictionaries.This paper is divided into five chapters:The first chapter introduces the earlier research of Mathews and the Chinese-English Dictionary before this thesis.It also introduces the method applied in this research.Chapter 2 reveals the facts of the author Matthews and his dictionary.Chapter 3 mainly finds out its lexical characters from its macrostructure and microstructure and its innovation of the blueprint and Yuanren Chao's revision.The chapter 3 gives a detailed description of the revision by Yuanren Chao including the error revision,new entries,the retroflex vowels and tones in Peiping dialect and the arrangement by syllabic headings.The chapter 5 focuses on the influence the dictionary.Searching in the WorldCat database,we can know its library collection and influence around the world.This dictionary is distinctive in its entries selection,definitions,illustrative examples.It selected a lot of new expressions in 1931 and definition of character is normative and synchronic.Its illustrative examples are typical and practical.Especially after the revision by Yuanren Chao and published by Harvard University Press in 1943,it gets more popular in the United States.