Transcript Learners` Dictionary

LEARNERS’
DICTIONARY
Deny A. Kwary
www.kwary.net
TODAY’S TOPICS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
The Objective of Designing MLDs
The History of MLDs
The Main features of MLDs
The Impact of Corpora
The Sketch Engine
1. THE OBJECTIVE
OF
DESIGNING MLDS
The monolingual learners’ dictionary (MLD) is
a type of dictionary designed specifically to
meet the needs of non-native language learners.
 MLD is above all an English phenomenon or,
even more specifically, a British one.
 The most powerful stimulus in the development
of MLDs has been – and remains – the practical
challenge of providing language learners with
the resources to meet their twin communicative
needs: ‘receptive’ understanding and
‘productive’ use of a second language.
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2. THE HISTORY OF MLDS (1)
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The foundations of the MLD were laid down in
the 1920s and 1930s by a handful of British
academics, including Harold Palmer, Michael
West, and A. S. Hornby, whose theoretical
interests in syntax, phraseology, and what would
later be called collocation were motivated above
all by their work in English language teaching.
2. THE HISTORY OF MLDS (2)
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1935: New Method English Dictionary (NMED) by Michael
West. NMED is a fairly slim volume covering around 18,000
headwords.
1942: Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary by A. S.
Hornby. This dictionary then evolved into the Oxford
Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD), which is still the
most popular MLD until now.
Since the 1970s, Hornby’s dictionary has been joined by
several other U.K.-based contenders: the Longman
Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE, 1978), the
Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (COBUILD,
1987), the Cambridge International Dictionary of English
(CIDE, 1995), and the Macmillan English Dictionary for
Advanced Learners (MED, 2002).
3. THE MAIN FEATURES OF MLDS (1)
The main features for receptive function (helping users
understand vocabulary items they have encountered):
 definitions are written in simple language, typically
using a controlled ‘defining vocabulary’ of basic
words;
 phraseology gets special attention: the MLD generally
goes further than other types of dictionary in
explaining the meanings not only of individual words
but also of multiword expressions of every type;
 aids to navigation are provided (in the form of
reduced definitions, appearing as ‘signposts’ or in
menus) in order to minimize the known problems
involved in locating the ‘right’ information.
3. THE MAIN FEATURES OF MLDS (2)
The main features for productive function (helping users to
make appropriate lexical choices and then use the chosen item
‘correctly’ and idiomatically):
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syntactic information provides users with a full account of the
valence patterns that a given word or meaning enters into;
example sentences are used extensively to show typical
contexts of use and provide reliable models for production;
considerable attention is paid to sociolinguistic features such
as register, regional variety, and speaker attitude;
usage notes provide supplementary guidance, e.g., facilitating
lexical choices by disambiguating sets of close synonyms or
warning against known sources of grammatical error.
4. THE IMPACT OF CORPORA
Corpus: A collection of written or spoken
materials.
(Corpora is the plural form of Corpus)
 The sources: magazine articles, brochures,
newspapers, lectures, sermons, broadcasts,
chapters on novels, etc.
 The first large corpus of English-language data is
The Survey of English Usage.
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THE SURVEY OF ENGLISH USAGE
The first large corpus of English-language data,
compiled in the 1960s.
 It was directed by Randolph Quirk and based at
University College London.
 It consists of 1,000,000 words taken from 200
texts of spoken and written materials.
 The texts were transcribed by hand and stored on
index cards.
 In the 1970s the spoken component was made
electronically available by Jan Svartvik of Lund
University.
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THE BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS (BNC)
A collaboration between Longman, Oxford
University Press, Chambers Harrap (Oxford
University Computing Service), The University
of Lancaster, and the British Library.
 Compilation from 1991 until 1994 = 100 million
words. Particular attention has been paid to the
internal balance of the corpus.
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THE BANK OF ENGLISH
It was pioneered by John Sinclair and his
colleagues at the University of Birmingham,
corpus lexicography burst upon the world in the
form of the first COBUILD dictionary (1987), and
the methodology was quickly taken up by other
dictionary developers of all types.
 At beginning it contained 20 million words.
 The Bank of English reached 450 million words in
2002.
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5. THE SKETCH ENGINE (1)
The Sketch Engine is a product of Lexical
Computing Ltd., Director: Adam Kilgarriff.
 The Sketch Engine (SkE, also known as
Word Sketch Engine) is a Corpus Query
System incorporating word sketches,
grammatical relations, and a
distributional thesaurus.
 Word Sketches have been used as the
starting point for high-accuracy Word Sense
Disambiguation.
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THE SKETCH ENGINE (2)
Word Sketches were first used in the Macmillan
English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2002,
Edited by Michael Rundell).
 The SkE is in use for lexicography at Oxford
University Press, FrameNet, Collins, Chambers
Harrap, Macmillan and elsewhere.
 It is in use for teaching and research at universities
and research laboratories in Belgium, Brazil,
Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, France,
Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the
Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Taiwan, US and UK.
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THE SKETCH ENGINE (3): THE WORD SKETCH FOR “ECCENTRIC”
THAT’S ALL FOR THIS WEEK…
THANK YOU.