A Study Of Representation Strategies Of Adjective-adverb Lexemes In The American Heritage Dictionary Of The English Language(5th Edition)

Word class categorization,as the core issue in the study of language,has received a great amount of attention throughout the ages.The difficulty is particularly true when it comes to the issue of multiple class membership which is a complex grammatical phenomenon covering morphology,syntax and lexicology.The adjective-adverb lexeme however fails to attract much deserved attention despite its long-standing existence in communal language of analytic languages.Most of the existing studies of adjective-adverb lexeme are conducted from the perspective of morphology or syntax,instead of empirical study based on big data.Given the research gap,under the guidance of the Two-level Word Class Categorization Theory(TLWCCT),an exhaustive empirical study of the representation strategies of adjective-adverb lexemes will be conducted at both macro-level and micro-level based on the DIY database of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language(5th edition).The microstructure representation consists of three dimensions: definition,sense ordering and exemplification.It is found that AHD-5,as the epitome of the communal language in Modern English,presents an authentic picture of the multifunctionality of lexemes,which serves as a demonstration for the treatment of heterosemy in analytic languages.At macro-level,there exist 10570 multi-category lexemes in AHD-5,accounting for 9.24% of all the entries;among all the two-category lexemes,there are 466 adjective-adverb lexemes,which occupies 4.86%.At micro-level,it is found that the representation strategies of adjective-adverb lexemes in AHD-5 are characterized by normalization,objectivity and user-friendliness.Besides,a clear-cut distinction of word class categorization between lexical level(i.e.at langue)and syntactic level(i.e.at parole)helps to treat the adjective-adverb lexemes of analytic languages in more appropriate ways.Based on TLWCCT,the thesis relates to a systematic empirical study of the representation strategies of adjective-adverb lexemes in AHD-5,which can not only deepen the perception of the essence of multiple class membership,but also shed some lights to the representation strategies of adjective-adverb lexemes in Chinese dictionaries.