Towards The Principles For A Systematic Treatment Of Lexical Collocations In English-Chinese Learner's Dictionary

The present study undertakes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the verb-noun collocational deviants based on the Chinese College Learner English Corpus (COLEC) so as to explore possible difficulties and/or problems that exist in the production of English lexical collocations by Chinese EFL learners and establish the principles for representing lexical collocations English-Chinese learner's dictionaries (ECLDs). The paper also examines how the mainstream English monolingual learners' dictionaries and English collocational dictionaries for learners deal with lexical collocations for the purpose of assimilating their good practices into the compiling of ECLDs.With the research findings of the corpus-based study and inspirations from the critique of English learners' dictionaries, the thesis proposes, from a user perspective, the following principles for a systematic representation of lexical collocations in ECLDs: 1) At the megastructure level, the layout of the megastructure should help the findability and acquisition of English lexical collocations; 2) The selected collocations should be incorporated into the microstructure of an entry both in a self-evident style and with sufficient usage information that guarantee maximum usability and accessibility; 3)The mediostructure should ensure the systemic linkage between relevant collocations as well as collocations listed under both the base entries and collocate entries; 4) The access structure should ensure the accessibility of collocational information in ECLDs; 5) The distribution structure should represent a reasonable distribution of linguistic and encyclopedic/extralinguistic information for some culture-specific collocations.