A Comparative Study Of Lexical Meaning Treatments Of Verbs Of Vision In English Learner's Dictionaries And FrameNet

Fillmore et al. (2001) state that as frame semantics is used to describe lexical meanings, the basic assumption is that each word (in a given meaning) evokes a particular frame and probably profiles some elements or aspects of the frame. FrameNet based on frame semantics is used as an online dictionary. It distinguishes and describes the semantic frames and combines the semantic and syntactic information together, which can more fully display the organization of human language than other previous dictionaries. Therefore a frame-based lexicon offers more comprehensive information than the traditional lexicon.With the maturity of FrameNet, the employment of frame semantics in lexicography is well received by us. The dictionary based on frame semantics is quite different from the traditional learner's dictionaries, in that "the concept of'headword' becomes obsolete" and "the whole frame is the definiendum" (Atkins 1995:26-27). It has been used to build on-line dictionary, but seldom used to make a paper-based dictionary. Paper-based dictionaries are still the first choice for learners for a long time in the future.The lexical meaning treatments involve how to deal with the sense, definition, examples and so on. Sense is the result of segmentation of lexical meaning by the dictionary compliers. And every sense describes together the lexical meaning of the lemma. The sense division is the premise of definition and good sense arrangement is helpful for the users to find the target quickly. So sense division and sense arrangement are important in dictionary compiling. Furthermore, because most of English words are polysemous words which have complicated semantic and syntactic structures, the sense division and sense arrangement of polysemous words are very difficult in dictionary compiling.The words expressing vision in English are very rich. Verbs of Vision reflect the most basic human experience of space, and attracted attention of most cognitive linguists. Besides, FrameNet contain rich semantic relations, which is poor in learner's dictionary with usually only a few semantic relations just about the synonymy or antonymy. In this thesis firstly it analyzes the sense division and ordering of observe in five learner's dictionaries and FrameNet, and then is about the semantic relations and their presentations in both. So this thesis will investigate different models of lexical meaning treatments of verbs of vision in traditional learner's dictionaries and FrameNet, compare their advantages and disadvantages respectively to see which one is more user-friendly, and then put forward some implications for the compilation of traditional learner's dictionaries.