A Study Of Sense Division And Sense Discrimination Of Polysemous Words In Chinese-English Dictionaries Aimed At Foreign Users

Language is the most convenient and fundamental means of human communication.Students from different countries and cultures are advised to master a foreign language during their school life.With the ever-lasting progress of globalization and the increase of the nation's comprehensive power,especially with the successful holding of the 'truly exceptional' Beijing Olympics in August 2008,China and the Chinese language have become more and more popular in this century.A good Chinese-English dictionary is indispensable in popularizing the Chinese language, and the core value of such an excellent dictionary is mainly embodied in its sense description of the Chinese headwords.During the process of sense description,one of the most challenging parts facing dictionary compilers is sense division of the polysemous words;and actually,the problem of polysemy has also been puzzling other linguists interested in lexical semantics.Traditionally,semanticists and lexicographers tended to tackle this problem basing partially on certain linguistic data and partially on their instinctive judgments. The results of such interpreting,therefore,may be more of the individual scholars' subjective reflections,instead of the objective descriptions of the polysemous words under consideration.It becomes even more problematic when dealing with the issue of describing polysemous words in Chinese,and one of the reasons leading to this confusion is because of the lack of statistically-based researches on Chinese semantics. Thus,it is necessary for lexicographers or semanticists to have access to the large tagged Chinese corpus,if there had been such ones.Distinctions are to be drawn between the two cases of polysemy and homonymy in lexicographical practice,in that their arrangements are different from each other in most dictionaries:homonyms are distinguished by assigning to them distinctive superscript numbers and giving to each of them a separate entry;polysemous senses,on the other hand,are listed under a single main headword and are treated as different meanings of the same word.In other words,while homonyms are given separate entries,polysemous senses are listed under the same lexical entry.In a Chinese-English dictionary,sense division of the Chinese words is the basis of their sense discrimination,during which new entries are to be made to cater to the linguistic needs of the foreign readers and to adapt to their way of understanding,via splitting or combining the sense(s) of the same headword as contrast to that in the published Chinese monolingual dictionaries.Therefore,both monolingual dictionaries of the source language and large corpora(including both the monolingual one and the parallel bilingual one) are much desirable in compiling bilingual dictionaries.In the practice of compiling an encoding Chinese-English dictionary aimed at the foreign users,the different senses of a polysemous word are suggested to be arranged by their usage frequency,the tagging of parts of speech should choose the approach of 'POS (parts of speech) first',the phrases beginning with the same headword are suggested to be listed in a sequence based on their strokes for promoting the foreign users' convenience,and each of the phrases should be labeled with their Chinese pinyin.