The Treatment Of Affixoids In English Learner’s Dictionaries: A Corpus-based Study

Affixoids, in great amount in modern English, are special elements for wordformation that lie between free morphemes and affixes. Many scholars have touchedupon this language phenomenon, but most of them discuss affixoids under theirsuperordinate notion of “combining form” because affixoids themselves are quiteparticular and complex. And these previous studies are lack of in-depth investigationand systematic research.Based on the review of previous studies on both combining form and affixoid,this thesis takes usage-based theory as its theoretical foundation in order to make anin-depth investigation of the treatment of affixoids in Oxford Advanced Learner’sDictionary (7thedition), Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary(5thedition) and LONGMAN Dictionary of Contemporary English (4thedition) withthe help of the Corpus of Contemporary American English. It is found that thelabeling of affixoids in these three learner’s dictionaries is not accurate enough.Affixoids are either taken as synonyms of combining forms or labeled as one of thesenses within an entry. The improper treatment has greatly ignored the morphologicalstatus and productivity of affixoids. This thesis suggests that the treatment of affixoidsin English learner’s dictionaries need to be based on the actual usage patterns found inlarge and balanced corpora and on a study of their morphological status andproductivity, rather than to simply put affixoids under the notion of combining formor label them in definitions.This study is significant not only in the practical aspect of the treatment ofaffixoids in English learner’s dictionaries, but also in the theoretical aspect of Englishmorphology.