Construction Of Word Association Boxes In The English Learner's Dictionary:A Lexical-semantic Network Approach

This thesis studies the word association boxes in English learner's dictionaries(ELDs)with the aim of improving the quality of the boxes.Previous studies show that Chinese EFL learners tend to overuse high-frequency words and underuse low-frequency words in their English compositions.Therefore,the Oxford dictionary,the Longman dictionary and the Macmillan dictionary have added a word association box,in which the base-words and the associated words establish different lexical-semantic relations and lexical-semantic networks,remedying the situation that the lexical-semantic networks in traditional dictionaries were cut off.However there is only a little detailed research on this box.Therefore,this thesis collects and studies four kinds of word association boxes in these three ELDs,which are the Wordfinder box,Wordfocus box,Other Ways of Saying box and Talking or Writing about box.Each word association box is comprised of a base-word and several associated words.There are 336 base-words and 3,468 associated words in all.The thesis employs a contrastive analysis method to compare the selections and the representations of those base-words and associated words in the boxes.In aspect of the selections,the frequency,the part of speech and the polysemy of all base-words are compared.It is found that all the base-words are high-frequency content words,and nouns which have more than one part of speech and more than one sense account for a large proportion of the base-words.Moreover,261 associated words were sampled in this research,and it is found that the ratio of the semantic adjacent associated words to all associated words ranks the first,and then follows the ratio of the collocational associated words and the ratio of the paradigmatic associated words.In addition,the frequency and the word form of the associated words are also compared.As for the representations of the base-words and the associated words,the thesis investigates the word forms of the base-words and the associated words,cross-reference structure linking the base-words and the associated words and definitions and examples for the associated words.The thesis devises a new word association framework,which is based on the methodsof word association,the models of word association and the lexical-semantic relations.The framework contains four types of lexical-semantic relations.A sample word association box based on the framework is given.