A Cognitive Approach To Distinctive Semantic Features Of English Equivalents In Domestic-oriented CEDs

For Chinese learners,the Chinese-English dictionary(CED) is very convenient because it is indexed by Chinese characters.Traditional Chinese-English dictionaries only aim to translate the Chinese headwords into one or more English equivalents and the distinctive semantic features of the English equivalents are not interpreted in the entry,which cannot meet the needs of the learners.The present thesis set out to study the representation of the distinctive semantic features of the English equivalents in the domestic-oriented Chinese-English dictionaries.Either from the perspective of dictionary or users,distinctive semantic features play an important role.Because of its close relationship with near-synonym discrimination,contributions and defects of the previous studies on near-synonym discrimination will be analyzed.And with a cognitive approach,this thesis will make a systematic study on meaning types and propose to analyze distinctive semantic features from conceptual meaning,connotative meaning,pragmatic meaning and collocational restrictions.The empirical study shows that the learners' sensitivity to distinctive semantic features is rather low and they often need to know the distinctive semantic features when they are translating,writing and speaking.Unfortunately,insufficiency in this aspect is very obvious in CEDs.Some of the English equivalents have no distinctive semantic features,some have insufficient and the representation strategy is rather monotonous.And the contrastive study shows that ELDs do much better than CEDs.With highlights from ELDs,the author explores how to represent distinctive semantic features of the English equivalents in CEDs based on the Meaning Driven Multi-dimensional Definition(MDD).