Empirical Study On Inclusion Criteria For English Neologisms In OALD

With the fast development of new technology and especially the Internet,with further research into the outer space,more and more concepts are going to be formed,new objects will be found,and there is a great demand of using more new words to describe these concepts and objects.Then some of them should be recorded in a dictionary in time.Lexicographers for advanced learner's dictionary(ALD)always need to think about what kind of new words should be added into the new edition.For a learner's dictionary,all the words to be added,together with their linguistic and encyclopedic information,should all meet at least the threshold of the same standard in regard to their use in frequency,in time span,in diversity of distribution,and in derivative power,i.e.in their significance in the communication of the community.The present thesis mainly study the inclusion criteria for English neologism in Advanced Learner's Dictionary(ALD).The first thing in compiling a dictionary is to get a word list and decide which words should be included in it.When revising an ALD,lexicographers have to consider whether the words in this old edition could still serve the changing needs of advanced learners in a new era.In order to study the inclusion criteria for English neologism,new words and new senses published on the website of Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary(OALD)have been collected to find the main features and trends in the present thesis.Apart from the word-formation,it is interesting to find the main areas of English which are likely to generate new vocabulary: social-cultural aspect,human and behavior,business/economic/finance,computer and Internet.They have been published since 2015 so it is a chance to review the changes happened in the English-speaking countries in the latest five years based on these new words and senses.New words and new senses representing new concepts enter into the national consciousness.Their routes of taking into English could show the critical point when they have the significance in the communication of the community and should be included.So case study is also adopted in this part.Besides case study,qualitative methodology accompanied by small-scale quantitative methodology was also adopted in the present thesis.Both one hundred new words in OALD and one hundred new words in OED in the same year are randomly selected to compare differences of inclusion criteria in different dictionaries.As for ALD,four criteria are proposed in this thesis: the frequency criterion,the time criterion the distribution of usage,and the derivation criterion.These four criteria could help lexicographers to select new words or senses for ALD.According to the clear purpose of ALDs,meeting learner's needs is the basic principle running through whole process of compiling ALDs.