Synonyms Discrimination In English Learner’s Dictionaries On The Basis Of Frame Semantics

Desiderative verbs are a set of synonyms sharing similar syntactic structures and common semantic features. It is very difficult to distinguish one from another. This study examined the use of want, wish, and hope, the three most frequently used desiderative synonyms, against Chinese English Learner Corpus(CLEC) and British National Corpus(BNC). It was found that Chinese English learners use the desideratives quite differently from native speakers. Chinese English learners are likely to overuse hope, want and slightly overuse wish. They also have a poor mastery of collocations of these desideratives. In terms of semantic prosody, Chinese English learners would neglect the negative semantic prosody when a desiderative verb has a mixed semantic prosody and they focus on the positive pole. This indicates that Chinese English learners are not familiar with the usage and differences of these commonly used desiderative verbs.English learners depend on dictionaries at different levels and they tend to view dictionaries as an authority of language. This research examined Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and Merriam-Webster’s Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and found that few approaches to discriminate synonyms in learner’s dictionaries have been adopted for distinction. Besides, there is a lack of semantic features in definitions of the desideratives. Disagreement in sense divisions across the three desideratives suggests the potential problems with definitions written too broadly or too narrowly. Too broad definitions tend to bury subtle meaning of a lexical unit while too narrow definitions usually prevent users from capturing the semantic gist. Examples fail to illustrate contextual features and lack difference in semantic prosody. Information represented in dictionaries cannot distinguish the desiderative synonyms effectively.So we adopt Frame Semantics for effective discrimination, a theory treats words in different yet related frames. The objects of this study, the three most frequently used desiderative verbs, belong to the desiring frame which contains thirteen elements such as EXPERIENCER, EVENT, FOCAL PARTICIPANT etc. Each desiderative verb shows different features in different elements. We sampled one hundred sentences of each desideratives in discussion and analyzed them according to the desiring frame in order to find out the differences of the desideratives from the perspective of Frame Semantics. Several differences were found: 1) Though the three desideratives share similar syntactic patterns, they indicate different tendency in actual use; 2) The frame element EVENT of three desideratives tends to differ in content, attribute, duration, semantic prosody and result; 3) Three desideratives tend to indicate different DEGREE of desire owing to different collocates.Having found the differences of the desiderative synonyms, we attempted to apply the findings to dictionaries. Semantic differences in FEs will be integrated into the components of microstructure and mediostructure and they will be displayed by virtue of definition, example, cross-reference and usage note. New entries of the synonyms under the guidance of Multidimensional Definition Theory(MDDT) are offered. The new entries are believed to be able to distinguish the synonyms in a better way.