On Representation Of Verb-Noun Collocations Of Reciprocal Verbs In English-Chinese Dictionaries Based On Corpora

As an important constituent in the linguistic system,collocation,especially verbnoun collocation,has received much attention in recent years.Compared with systematic studies in second language acquisition and phraseology,lexicographic studies on collocations are still in infancy and mainly rest on verb-noun collocations of high frequency verbs which can’t represent all verb-noun collocations in language system.Taking reciprocal verbs as example,this study explores verb-noun collocations of non-high frequency verbs.On the one hand,it can extend the research fields of verbnoun collocations;on the other hand,it is conducive to in-depth analysis of the distinctive features of reciprocal verbs.Based on the perspective of users,taking CLEC corpus as data source,this study adopts error analysis to investigate reciprocal verbs’ verb-noun collocational profile of the Chinese learners and analyze causes of errors.Analysis shows that learners’ errors are caused by negative transfer of collocations,the discrepancy of thinking models on collocations,ignorance of collocational restriction and weakness of communication strategy on collocations.In addition to this,the study investigates representation model of two English learners’ dictionaries(ELDs)and three domestic English-Chinese learners’ Dictionaries(ECLDs).The result shows that both ELDs and ECLDs show strong phraseological tendency.But foreign ELDs include much more collocations than ECLDs published by domestic presses in coverage of verb-noun collocations.Besides,by error analysis and investigation of representation model of current dictionaries,we find some deficiencies in current dictionaries,including poor coverage of verb-noun collocations,lack of colligations,deficiency of semantic preference and semantic prosody,paucity of synonyms discrimination and error warnings.Based on co-selection theory and theory of norms and exploitations(TNE),the study constructs a new representation model which is composed of corpus-driven principle,phraseoriented principle,norm-centred principle and exploitation-aided principle.The study is of both theoretical and practical significance.It is theoretical in that the study constructs a new representation model for verb-noun collocations of reciprocal verbs based on co-selection theory and TNE.Practically,this study can shed light on collocational teaching and dictionary compilation.