An Empirical Study Of The POS Labeling Of Physics Entries In A Chinese-English Dictionary (Third Ediiton)

With the development of international academic exchange and national quality,the discipline words become increasingly significant. Currently, scholars focus onsuch aspects as conclusion and translation. Word class classification is always theemphasis and hotspot in the research of Chinese grammar. Nevertheless, it is rare tosee empirical research on POS labeling of discipline words based on large-scalecorpus. However, owing to the ambiguous criterion of Chinese word classclassification, there are many problems in the POS labeling of academic entries indictionaries. This will definitely causes confusion of dictionary users. In the light ofthe usage-based perspective, the thesis carries out an empirical research on the POSlabeling of physics entries in A Chinese-English Dictionary (3rd edition)(CED3forshort) with the hope to facilitate dictionary compilation as well as the furtherresearches of academic words.Language is a complex adaptive system and word class categorization varieswith linguistic changes. According to the perspective of Usage-based Theory, wordfrequency poses great influence on the cognitive representation and categorization oflanguage structure and the inner grammar of language users. Therefore, by analyzingthe usage patterns of a word, we can identify its word class in language stratification.The thesis carries out synchronic comparison between CED3and The ContemporaryChinese Dictionary (5th edition) as well as diachronic comparison between CED3andits two editions so as to collect the research objects. Based on the modern Chinesecorpus of Center for Chinese Linguistic PKU, the thesis conducts quantitative andqualitative analyses on the collected111physics entries with incorrect POS labeling.Moreover, it explores the possible reasons of the incorrect labeling in the light ofUsage-based Theory.The results shows that compared with the other three dictionaries, CED3hasmade a big progress in both increasing number of physics words and full-scale POSlabeling. However, CED3neglects the linguistic changes and provides POS labeling mainly based on the criterion of semantic meaning. It is inappropriate in the handlingof multicategory words, especially verb-noun, noun-adjective, verb-adjective. Thesewords may firstly used as monocategory words at first, but their word classcategorization changes through time by means of decategorization andrecategorization. Gradually, the new usage fixed in language stratification and itdeserves to be presented in dictionaries.Therefore, this study adopts a new perspective and integrates the qualitative andquantitative research methods. Hopefully it will exert positive effects on the in-depthstudy of academic words and the POS labeling in Chinese-English dictionaries.