On The Treatment Of Compounds In Advanced English Learner’s Dictionaries

Compounding is an important word formation of English. With the rapid development of society, all kinds of new things appear many of which are named by compounds. Therefore, compounds have becoming a key part in vocabulary learning and been given much attention by the compliers of the learner’s dictionaries. However, many researchers only focus on the location of compounds in the dictionaries and rarely concern about the depth treatment of the compounds.In this study, under the foundation of the theory of norms and exploitations, seven blocks were randomly chosen from Edward L. Thorndike’s block system of distribution of dictionary entries, and the compounds in the seven blocks in each of the Big Five English learner’s dictionaries were investigated to find out how they are treated, including the scope, location, written form, semantic range, POS labels and collocates. And a corpus survey was further made on the basis of the problems revealed by the dictionary survey. It aims to propose a tentative modal for better the treatment of compounds in learner’s dictionaries.The results of the two surveys in this study are as follows:(1) The standard of the coverage of compounds differs greatly among the Big five;(2) The placing of some compounds has disobeyed the editing policy;(3) The written forms, semantic range, POS labels of some compounds provided in the dictionaries are not based on their frequencies in the corpus;(4) The collocates of the compounds lack adequate treatment. A model for treating compounds in the learner’s dictionary is proposed as a tentative solution to the problems.In this study, not only is the theory of TNE applied to the instruction of dictionary-making, some advice to improve the treatment of compounds in learner’s dictionaries is also provided.