Inclusion And Entry Arrangement Of Culture-specific Words And Expressions In Chinese-English Learner's Dictionaries

As an indispensable part of the Chinese language,Chinese culture-specific words and expressions are difficult for international students learning Chinese as a foreign language(CFL)and need special attention.Therefore,importance should be attached to the Chinese culture-specific words in Chinese-English dictionaries targeted at international learners of Chinese.At present,however,the inclusion and representation of such culture-specific words in Chinese-English dictionaries is less than satisfactory.Attempts must be made to improve the quality of culture-specific entries appearing in dictionaries that are intended for the use of foreign language learners.In order to make Chinese-English dictionaries for non-native learners of Chinese better serve their users,the Chinese culture-specific words are classified into six categories according to their meanings and forms: two-character general cultural words,three-character phrases,four-character idioms,allegorical expressions and poems.Characteristics of each type are explored and summarized.Entries from two popular Chinese-English dictionaries,A Chinese-English Dictionary for Foreign Learners(AEDFL)and A Basic Dictionary for Chinese Language Learning(ABDCLL)are borrowed from to explore the representations of each kind of Chinese culture-specific words.It is found that general cultural words are often insufficient in culture background information,phrases are not given effective contexts,idioms are deprived of relevant background stories,and entries of poems,allegorical sayings and other sayings prove inadequate in terms of etymologies.An examination of questionnaire results and learners' corpus error analysis reveals that CFL learners do experience difficulty in comprehending Chinese culture-specific words.The most common error types include misuse,misspelling,disorder,omission and redundancy.Meanwhile,CFL learners tend to avoid the difficult Chinese culture-specific words when producing language.This thesis provides corpus evidence regarding the representation of Chinese culture-specific words through semantic component analysis,semantic prosody identification and bottom-up research method.The research findings reported in this thesis suggest that the compilation of the Chinese-English dictionaries for non-native learners of Chinese should be guided by culture schema theory.To build world schema and text schema,which incorporate the learners' cognitive structure reflects Chinese customs and background knowledge,the Chinese-English learners' dictionaries improvement can be made at macrostructure level,microstructure level and mediostructure level.Specially,information can be rearranged appended to the definitions,corresponding senses,labels,glosses,examples and illustrations.Boxes for etymological analysis and usage notes should be created if they contribute to the comprehension of the headword involved.With such modifications in place,it is hoped that the improved Chinese-English learners' dictionaries will become more useful and educational tools available for reference,which can benefit CFL learners and bridge gaps in cross-cultural communication and interaction.