A Study On Chinese Lexicographic Terminology Standardization From A Communicative Perspective

With an ultimate goal to advance terminology standardization in the field of lexicography,the present thesis attempts to study the standardization of Chinese lexicographic terms by drawing upon the Communicative Terminology Theory.From a communicative perspective,terms are not merely representations of specialized concepts,but also communicative units.That is to say,the value of terms consists not only in the specialized knowledge they store,but also in how effectively and efficiently they transmit that knowledge,which is ensured by the standardization of terms.In addition to knowledge transmission,terminology standardization also exerts positive influence on subject development,academic communication and academic translation.As a result,more and more attention has been paid on the standardization of terms.Nonetheless,no relevant studies have been conducted in the filed of lexicography.Hence,the thesis conducts an innovative investigation on lexicographic terminology standardization,aiming at uncovering the state quo of the standardized usage of Chinese lexicographic terms and discovering the internal and external approaches to achieve the standardization of Chinese lexicographic terms.In order to fulfill those objectives,the study takes 42 Chinese lexicographic core terms as research objects and consists of three main parts.First,a survey is carried out on the state quo of the standardized usage of Chinese lexicographic terms in a self-built micro corpus and 7 academic books.Containing about 2.75 million words,the corpus is composed of 418 papers published in Lexicographical Studies from 2013 to 2017 and 267 dissertation abstracts in Chinese from four universities from 2001 to 2017.Besides,data is also collected from 7 academic books containing about 2.03 million words by consulting their subject indexes.Afterwards,based on the results,case study is adopted to find out practical internal approaches to standardize Chinese lexicographic terms.Finally,the external effective approaches are probed into in the third part.Conclusively,there are four major findings.First and foremost,the state quo of Chinese lexicographic terminology standardization is unsatisfactory as standardized names examined and approved by authoritative institutions are not always complied by scholars.Results of the survey show that: 1)standardized usage(57.92%)is slightly dominant on the whole,2)among the 29 valid terms,48.28% terms are found to be more often-used in their standardized names while 51.72% are the opposite,3)some standardized terms have the tendency to be replaced by the non-standardized one,and 4)concise terms regardless of their standardized status are preferred by scholars.Secondly,the thesis maintains that clarification of synonymous terms and unification of terminology translations are two basic approaches to standardize Chinese lexicographic terms internally,grounded on the representational role of terminology.Thirdly,on the basis of the communicative role of terminology,subject indexes making and subject dictionary compilation are turned out to be two effective external approaches.Last but not least,terminology standardization should be based more on academic corpus information and turn from purely top-down prescription to bottom-up usage description.Following the Communicative Terminology Theory,the thesis argues that though on the one hand terms should be standardized by authoritative institutions,on the other hand conventionalization of usage should also be taken into account.In a communicative perspective,names of terms based on academic corpus of running texts are more conforming to the conventionalized and systematic nature of terms,and more reflective of the real use of terminology in academia.In addition to bringing more attention on the standardization of lexicographic terms and pushing its progress,it is also desirable that this paper could provide some help to promote the development of lexicography as a scientific subject,optimize academic communication in lexicography and normalize terminology translations towards standardization of lexicographic terms.What's more,the development of subject indexes making in lexicographic books and the compilation of a Chinese dictionary of lexicography are hoped to be accelerated by the present study.