| The definition in a dictionary entry has always been considered the main task for lexicographers,which makes it significant to optimize the current lexicographic definitions.Among the theories adopted in the definition practice,categorization has become the subject of a number of studies over the past several years.However,most of these studies focus on the prototypes only.The disadvantage of the prototype categorization is that in some cases there are no particular prototypes at hand,which causes much trouble for both the categorization and analysis of the words.Therefore,this study tries to define the words of transportation from the schema categorization theory.The construction of the new definition involves the following steps.1)First,the headwords of transportation are collected from the printed dictionaries.2)Second,the collected words are divided into several categories from the cognitive domain perspective.3)Third,the next job is to analyze the features of every category.In this step,the image schema,more than prototypes,is used to describe the set of features shared by all members of one category.In cases where there are no prototypes,the prototypical features can be drawn from the image schema.4)Fourth,once the features of the category are figured out,the comparison between the member words can be made to uncover their unique features.The unique features of every particular word play the role of distinguishing them from the other members in the same category.5)Building on the previous information of categorization and features,the new definition can be worked out.The first part of the definition is about the categorization information and the other part represents the distinguishing features. |
