On Manifestation Of Nouns' Grammatical Information In ECLDs

In English,nouns are complicated content words,its complexity reflected not only in the morphological variations of number but also in the category of words which can occur with nouns.What's more,nouns have a division between countable and uncountable nouns.Countable nouns have variation in number and morphological variation while uncountable nouns have not.Each has different determiners to go with. Syntactically,nouns can occur with many different kinds of words such as verbs, adjectives,prepositions and even including nouns themselves.Therefore,the acquisition of nouns stands an obstacle for Chinese advanced learners.On the other hand,owing to the inequity between languages,the same Chinese word may have two or more than two English equivalents.Distinction between synonyms,especially those similar in sense for Chinese learners,is believed to be difficulty in the process of foreign language learning.Errors are unavoidable in English learning.It is of great necessity and effective guidance for the compilation of an ECLD to obtain an objective understanding of Chinese learners' errors by a system of analysis and study.Corpus study,especially learner corpus study,provides illuminative insight into learner language and further enables lexicographers to produce more user-friendly dictionaries.The compilation of an English-Chinese Dictionary for Chinese Learners cannot be accomplished without the assistance of Chinese Learner Corpus(CLEC).The thesis aims to find out a better way to represent the grammatical information of nouns in an ECLD and offer effective help to their acquisition of English nouns. Two empirical corpus-based studies were conducted.Firstly,an empirical research is conducted based on CLEC by means of corpus retrieval tools like AntConc,aiming to see the common errors Chinese learners are most likely to commit.Seeking theoretical and practical support from Error Analysis and at the same time using another corpus retrieval tool,the Sketch Engine to access nouns which Chinese learners have difficulties in the British National Corpus(BNC), it becomes clear that Chinese learners have difficulties in the distinction between countable and uncountable nouns and the combinational use of noun with other word classes.The second empirical research is to examine the actual treatment of nouns in the four mainstream English learner's dictionaries(ELDs),five English-Chinese learner's dictionaries(ECLDs) produced by Chinese lexicographers or researchers as well as to incorporate the best practice of other dictionaries of common errors and some studies on noun errors made by other linguists.What's more,a survey is to be conducted to look into what Chinese learners' preference when using a dictionary,hoping to offer guidance on how to create a more user-friendly model of representation.With the enlightenment of relevant information concerning remarkable noun errors from ELDs,based on comparison between CLEC and BNC,some suggestions are made and samples of such grammatical information presentation are given.