The Incorporation Of New Senses Into Chinese-English Dictionaries For Chinese EFL Learners

Nowadays,our society is changing dynamically,new things and concepts are constantly emerging,and people tend to associate these new things with their own mental lexical networks,thus the existing words have been given new senses.As a simple and economical way of meaning extension,new senses of existing words profoundly affect the Chinese lexical system and also reflect the new trend of contemporary Chinese.Chinese-English dictionaries?CEDs?are important learning tools for EFL learners,lexicographers of the CEDs should pay attention to new senses.These new senses should be put into dictionaries as soon as they are stable in use and appropriate equivalents and sufficient examples are needed to satisfy the needs of EFL learners.However,there are some deficiencies in the incorporation and entry arrangement of new senses of existing words in existing CEDs.In order to make the CEDs more convenient to serve the needs of the EFL learners,this thesis starts with a series of comparative researches to explore the current practice with regard to the entry arrangement and representation of new senses in existing CEDs by examining the two domestic mainstream Chinese-English dictionaries:NCCED 2ⁿdd and NACED 2^nd.The survey is conducted from different perspectives such as the inclusion of new senses,sense ordering and the number of examples with supporting statistical data.And through specific case studies,three deficiencies in existing CEDs are found including partial equivalents,disordered sense ordering and insufficient number of examples.Based on the findings,this thesis proposes that the entry arrangement of new senses in CEDs should be made under the guideline of Prototype Theory,Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Input Hypothesis and the internal relation between the old senses and new senses should be fully considered.With the help of corpus data,some suggestions are put forward to optimize the entry arrangement of new senses in CEDs,so that CEDs can better satisfy the needs of EFL learners.