User-friendliness of verb syntax in pedagogical dictionaries of English 9783110941098, 9783484391307

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Series Maior

LEXICOGRAPHICA Series Maior Supplementary Volumes to the International Annual for Lexicography Supplements ä la Revue Internationale de Lexicographie Supplementbände zum Internationalen Jahrbuch für Lexikographie

Edited by Pierre Corbin, Reinhard R. K. Hartmann, Franz Josef Hausmann, Ulrich Heid, Sven-Göran Malmgren, Oskar Reichmann, Ladislav Zgusta 130

Published in cooperation with the Dictionary Society of North America (DSNA) and the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX)

Anna Dziemianko

User-friendliness of verb syntax in pedagogical dictionaries of English

Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 2006

to my Mother and Kasia and in memory of my late Father and Grandmother

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.ddb.de abrufbar. ISBN-13: 978-3-484-39130-7 ISBN-10: 3-484-39130-8

ISSN 0175-9264

© M a x Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 2006 Ein Unternehmen der K. G. Saur Verlag G m b H , München http://www.niemeyer.de Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany. Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier. Druck: L a u p p & Göbel G m b H , Nehren Einband: Nädele Verlags- und Industriebuchbinderei, Nehren

Table of Contents

List of Tables List of Figures Chapter 1. Theoretical and historical considerations 1.1. Introduction 1.2. User-friendliness - a definition 1.3. Trends in the presentation of verb syntax in pedagogical lexicography 1.3.1. Codes 1.3.1.1. Theoretical underpinnings 1.3.1.2. Coding systems in learners'dictionaries - an outline 1.3.2. Uncoded syntactic information 1.3.2.1. Examples 1.3.2.2. Definitions 1.4. Previous research and current hypotheses

VII XI 1 1 5 8 8 8 11 19 19 28 39

Chapter 2. Methods 2.1. Materials 2.1.1. An overview 2.1.2. The multiple choice task 2.1.3. Dictionaries 2.1.3.1. Definitions 2.1.3.2. Codes and pattern illustrations 2.1.3.3. Examples and other fixed components of the entry 2.1.3.4. Entry design, variables and experimental design 1.2.2. Statistical methods 2.3. Subjects 2.3.1. Sampling 2.3.2. Assignment 2.3.3. General characteristics - the questionnaire 2.3.3.1. A profile 2.3.3.2. Performance 2.3.3.3. Experience in dictionary use 2.4. Procedures and data organization 2.4.1. Procedures 2.4.2. Pretest analysis 2.4.3. Data rostering

45 45 45 54 55 55 62 67 69 72 83 83 89 92 92 95 101 109 109 110 114

Chapter 3. Results 3.1. Preliminary findings 3.1.1. Identification of verb syntax in entries 3.1.1.1. Nine entries 3.1.1.2. Six entries

117 117 117 117 121

VI 3.1.1.2.1. Background information 3.1.1.2.2. Analysis proper 3.1.2. Use of the identified syntactic information 3.1.3. Localization of verb syntax in entries - concurrent selection of sources 3.1.3.1. A qualitative approach 3.1.3.2. A quantitative approach 3.2. Main findings - independent and moderator variables and the localization of verb syntax in entries 3.2.1. Dependent variables - an overview 3.2.2. Definitions 3.2.3. Examples 3.2.4. Codes 3.2.5. The role of pattern illustrations in shaping the localization of verb syntax in entries 3.2.5.1. API 3.2.5.2. CPI 3.3. Ancillary findings - a sidelight 3.3.1. Prefatory remarks 3.3.2. The role of proficiency level 3.3.3. Gender differences 3.3.4. Utility of the explanatory information on symbols used in verb codes 3.3.5. Verb syntax misidentification and misuse - a thumbnail sketch 3.3.5.1 .Misidentification 3.3.5.2. Misuse 3.4. An attempt at generalization - the four-way ANOVA 3.4.1. Preliminaries 3.4.2. Definitions 3.4.3. Examples 3.4.4. Codes 3.4.5. Concluding remarks 3.5.Discussion Bibliography (a) Cited dictionaries (b) Other literature Appendix

121 124 129 133 133 137 139 139 145 147 148 151 151 153 154 154 155 158 160 161 161 165 168 168 171 177 180 184 186 193 193 194 203

List of Tables

Table 1.1. Types of coding system in learners' dictionaries 13 Table 1.2. Examples for the core meaning of kill in the learners' dictionaries published since 1995 26 Table 1.3. Analytical definitions of inspect 33 Table 2.1. Constituents of the multiple choice task and sources of verb syntax in entries 47 Table 2.2. Symbols in formal and functional codes used in dictionary entries 63 Table 2.3. Relevance of syntactic information in entries to the multiple choice task . . 68 Table 2.4. Independent variables and inter-dictionary comparisons 70 Table 2.5. Critical values of Ζ for nondirectional and directional tests at various levels of significance 78 Table 2.6. University students and university subjects by years/strata 87 Table 2.7. High school subjects by schools and grades 88 Table 2.8. Distribution of the dictionaries among the HSS and the US 92 Table 2.9. The HSS and the US by gender 93 Table 2.10. Average length of instruction in English and its variability in both samples 94 Table 2.11. The HSS' and the US' appraisal of success in the experiment 96 Table 2.12. Familiarity with the back matter - the HSS and the US 98 Table 2.13. The subjects' opinion of the back matter 99 Table 2.14. Instruction in monolingual English dictionary use by place 102 Table 2.15. Frequency of monolingual English dictionary use by place 104 Table 2.16. Frequency of monolingual English dictionary use for productive purposes 105 Table 2.17. Effectiveness of monolingual English dictionary use for productive purposes 106 Table 2.18. Dictionaries of English used by the HSS and the US 107 Table 2.19. Pretest results Ill Table 2.20. Cases of failure in the pretest by examples and definitions 112 Table 2.21. Results of the pretest by verbs 114 Table 3.1. Identification of verb syntax in nine entries by the HSS 117 Table 3.2. Identification of verb syntax in nine entries by the US 119 Table 3.3. Identification of verb syntax in nine entries in both samples - a comparison 120 Table 3.4. Totally and partly irrelevant identification of verb syntax in six entries - the HSS 122 Table 3.5. Totally and partly irrelevant identification of verb syntax in six entries - the US 123 Table 3.6. Identification of verb syntax in six entries by the HSS 125 Table 3.7. Identification of verb syntax in six entries by the US 126 Table 3.8. Identification of verb syntax in six entries in both samples - a comparison . 127 Table 3.9. Identification of verb syntax in nine and six entries - a comparison 128 Table 3.10. Use of the identified syntactic information by the HSS 130 Table 3.11. Use of the identified syntactic information by the US 131

VIII Table 3.12. Use of the identified syntactic information in both samples - a comparison Table 3.13. Localization of verb syntax in eight dictionaries by the HSS Table 3.14. Localization of verb syntax in eight dictionaries by the US Table 3.15. Localization of verb syntax in API in both samples Table 3.16. Localization of verb syntax in CPI in both samples Table 3.17. The number of sources selectedin eight dictionaries Table 3.18. The number of sources selected m API and CPI Table 3.19. The HSS' reference to definitions, examples and codes in eight dictionaries (with confidence intervals) Table 3.20. The US' reference to definitions, examples and codes in eight dictionaries (with confidence intervals) Table 3.21. Reference to definitions, examples, codes and pattern illustrations in API (with confidence intervals) Table 3.22. Reference to examples, codes and pattern illustrations in CPI (with confidence intervals) Table 3.23. The independent variables and the HSS' reference to definitions Table 3.24. The independent variables and the US' reference to definitions Table 3.25. The independent variables and the HSS' reference to examples Table 3.26. The independent variables and the US' reference to examples Table 3.27. The independent variables and the HSS' reference to codes Table 3.28. The independent variables and the US' reference to codes Table 3.29. Influence of pattern illustrations on the localization of verb syntax in API . Table 3.30. Influence of pattern illustrations on the localization of verb syntax in CPI . Table 3.31. Localization of verb syntax in eight dictionaries in both samples - a comparison Table 3.32. Localization of verb syntax in API and CPI in both samples - a comparison Table 3.33. Localization of verb syntax in eight dictionaries by women and men . . . Table 3.34. Localization of verb syntax in API and CPI by women and men Table 3.35. Reference to codes with and without the help of the back matter Table 3.36. Sources of verb syntax misidentified in eight dictionaries Table 3.37. Influence of the form of codes on their misidentification Table 3.38. Sources of verb syntax misidentified in API and CPI Table 3.39. Sources of verb syntax misused in eight dictionaries Table 3.40. Sources of verb syntax misused in API and CPI Table 3.41. Analysis of variance - definitions Table 3.42. Interaction AxBxC (definitions) - selected comparisons Table 3.43. Interactions AxC, BxC and CxD (definitions) - selected comparisons . . . Table 3.44. Main effects Β and C (definitions) Table 3.45. Analysis of variance - examples Table 3.46. Interaction AxD (examples) - selected comparisons Table 3.47. Main effects Β and C (examples) Table 3.48. Analysis of variance - codes Table 3.49. Interaction BxCxD (codes) - selected comparisons Table 3.50. Interactions AxB and CxD (codes) - selected comparisons

132 134 135 136 136 137 138 140 141 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 152 153 156 157 158 159 161 162 163 164 166 167 171 172 174 175 177 177 178 180 181 181

IX Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table Table

3.51. Main effects A, B , C and D (codes) 182 3.52. The ANOVA - a summary of the results 184 A.2.1. The HSS and the US by gender - expected frequencies and deviances . . 210 A.2.2. The subjects' appraisal of success in the experiment expected frequencies and deviances 211 A.2.3. The subjects' familiarity with the back matter expected frequencies and deviances 212 A.2.4. The subjects' opinion of the back matter - expected frequencies and deviances 212 A.2.5. Instances of success in the pretest 213 A.2.6. Instances of failure in the pretest - the HSS and the US 216 A.3.1. Identification of verb syntax in nine entries by the HSS obtained values of Ζ 224 A.3.2. Identification of verb syntax in nine entries by the US obtained values of Ζ 224 A.3.3. Identification of verb syntax in six entries by the HSS obtained values of Ζ 225 A.3.4. Identification of verb syntax in six entries by the US obtained values of Ζ 225 A.3.5. Use of the identified syntactic information by the HSS obtained values of Ζ 226 A.3.6. Use of the identified syntactic information by the US obtained values of Ζ 226 A.3.7. Localization of verb syntax in thirteen entries in A F O and A F U N . . . . 227 A.3.8. Localization of verb syntax in thirteen entries in CFO and C F U N . . . . 227 A.3.9. Mean percentages used in the ANOVA and the percentages used in the Ζ test (in talics) 227

List of Figures

Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure

2.1. Dictionary versions used in the experiment 2.2. Sources of variability 2.3. The HSS and the US by gender 2.4. Average length of instruction in English - the HSS and the US 2.5. The HSS' and the U S ' appraisal of success in the experiment 2.6. The HSS' and the US' appraisal ofsuccess in the experiment - a summary 2.7. Familiarity with the back matter - the HSS and the US 2.8. The subjects'opinion of the back matter 2.9. Instruction in monolingual English dictionary use by place 2.10. Frequency of monolingual English dictionary use by place 2.11. Frequency of monolingual English dictionary use for productive purposes 2.12. Effectiveness of monolingual English dictionary use for productive purposes 3.1. Identification of verb syntax in nine entries by the HSS 3.2. Identification of verb syntax in nine entries by the US 3.3. Identification of verb syntax in nine entries in both samples a comparison 3.4. Identification of verb syntax in six entries by the HSS 3.5. Identification of verb syntax in six entries by the US 3.6. Identification of verb syntax in six entries in both samples - a comparison 3.7. Identification of verb syntax in nine and six entries - a comparison . . . . 3.8. Use of the identified syntactic information by the HSS 3.9. Use of the identified syntactic information by the US 3.10. Use of the identified syntactic information in both samples a comparison 3.11. Localization of verb syntax in eight dictionaries by the HSS 3.12. Localization of verb syntax in eight dictionaries by the US 3.13. Selection of one and a few sources of verb syntax in eight dictionaries . . 3.14. The HSS' reference to definitions, examples and codes in eight dictionaries 3.15. The US' reference to definitions, examples and codes in eight dictionaries 3.16. Reference to definitions, examples, codes and pattern illustrations in API 3.17. Reference to examples, codes and pattern illustrations in CPI 3.18. Localization of verb syntax in eight dictionaries in the samples a comparison 3.19. Localization of verb syntax in API and CPI in both samples a comparison 3.20. Sources of verb syntax misidentified in eight dictionaries 3.21. Sources of verb syntax misidentified in API and CPI 3.22. Sources of verb syntax misused in eight dictionaries

69 80 93 95 96 97 98 100 103 104 105 106 118 119 120 125 126 127 128 130 131 132 134 135 138 140 142 143 144 156 157 162 165 166

XII Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure

3.23. 3.24. 3.25. 3.26. 3.27. 3.28. 3.29.

Sources of verb syntax misused in API and CPI Interactions AxC, BxC and CxD (definitions) Main effects Β and C (definitions) Interaction AxD (examples) Main effects Β and C (examples) Interactions AxB and CxD (codes) Main effects A, B, C and D (codes)

167 174 176 178 179 182 183

Chapter 1. Theoretical and historical considerations

1.1. Introduction Lexicography as the practice of compiling dictionaries is said to be as old as human intellectual curiosity about language and contact between languages (Hartmann 1992: 151). Monolingual dictionaries for foreign learners of English (henceforth learners' dictionaries or pedagogical dictionaries), the first of which came into being in the third decade of the previous century, can thus be seen as relatively new. They have evolved from those for native speakers, which have been adapted for use in the language learning environment (Rundell 1988: 127). The established conventions of dictionary microstructure have been augmented with features considered indispensable to cater for the needs of non-native learners of English. In time, the features themselves achieved the status of conventions, and the pedagogical dictionary has developed into a distinct genre (Rundell 1998: 316). The distinctive design features of the learners' dictionary reflect the language handicaps and needs of non-native users (Cowie 1990: 685). Obviously, as Laufer (1992: 71) points out, the knowledge of a word presupposes, among other things, the knowledge of its pronunciation, spelling, morphology, syntactic behavior in a sentence, meaning(s) as well as collocational and pragmatic restrictions on use. Learners' knowledge of words is often only partial and, as a rule, not on a par with that of native speakers. The latter gain the knowledge gradually, by means of prolonged encounters with the word in a variety of different contexts. The process takes time that many foreign language learners cannot afford. The learners' dictionary is then seen as a shortcut to the acquisition process which should provide all necessary information about words at one sitting (Nesi 1999: 32). Importantly, native speakers can be assumed to have internalized much of the grammatical system of the language they speak. They also have a good command of semantic rules and restrictions governing the use of individual words, so they know intuitively how to form correct sentences (McCorduck 1993: 39). That is why they refer to their dictionaries mainly for decoding. Language learners, by contrast, due to the lack of the necessary knowledge of and native-like intuitions about the use of foreign words, need dictionaries which they could consult also for encoding purposes (Rundell 1988: 133-134). No wonder, then, that a commitment to describing syntactic behavior and phraseological units is one of the characteristics of learners' dictionaries (Rundell 1998: 318). It should be stressed, however, that the overall aim of any learners' dictionary is to make its contents not only appropriate for its target users, but also accessible to them. As Kernerman (1996: 410) puts it, "learners should have dictionaries that combine the pedagogic features they should be exposed to with whatever user-friendly features it is possible to give them". Pedagogical lexicography has been gaining impetus since the late 1970s (Kernerman 2000: 826-827). The spread of English as the lingua franca of the world, and thus a buoyant demand for good learners' dictionaries, are some of the factors which contributed to the process. Besides, publishers began to develop corpora and sponsor research on a large scale. Furthermore, the academic world took a strong interest in the field. Numerous publications devoted to learners' dictionaries appeared and university departments for lexicography were established. Computational lexicography started to flourish.

2 Additionally, the dictionary user has become widely regarded as a consumer whose needs are to be satisfied on a competitive market. 1 English pedagogical lexicography has been changing so rapidly that it is seen today as a "blossoming branch" and a "vibrant sector" of lexicography (Doppagne 1998: 589, Kernerman 2000: 826). Investigation into actual dictionary use is a factor whose role in this respect cannot be overestimated, either. Still, dictionary use, "normally a private matter, occurring as the need arises, and often behind closed doors" (Nesi — Hail 2002: 277), is notoriously difficult to research. That is why many studies rely on questionnaires or interviews. These survey methods leave a lot to be desired: they reveal the subjective opinions of dictionary users and their perception of the look-up process, rather than facts. As Hatherall (1984: 184) rightly asks: [a]re subjects saying what they do, or what they think they do, or what they think they ought to do, or indeed a mixture of all three? [...] do we not, on this basis, arrive at a consensus on how subjects are likely to behave when faced with a particular questionnaire, rather than authentic data on what they use the dictionary for?

Experimental research, by contrast, is more reliable in that it has the advantage of obtaining first-hand data on dictionary-using behavior (Nesi - Hail 2002: 277). However, the experimental approach, the most ambitious and complex (Hartmann 1989: 109), is underdeveloped in research on dictionary use. Although research in pedagogical lexicography is said to be gaining momentum (Kernerman 2000: 829) and there has been a significant leap in the number of articles on dictionary use, "one may note only a slight increase in experimental studies [...] while the number of anecdotal reports has been holding steady as a substantial percentage of the whole" (McCreary — Dolezal 1998: 616). 2 Besides, according to Hartmann (1987: 27), research into dictionary use reflects the immature state of the art; it is small-scale, non-representative, non-comparable, noncorrelational and non-replicable, which makes any findings tentative. The fact that only a few years ago Swanepoel (2000: 404) passed a similar opinion on the research implies that the situation still necessitates '"a quantum leap' into the realm of scientific replicability". Today, about 70 years after its creation, the pedagogical dictionary is available not only on paper, but also in electronic form. Electronic dictionaries, which often contain speech, can be interacted with, added to and put into the pocket, are more than just the replication of paper ones in an electronic device. Moreover, technological development has affected the dictionary scene insofar as the dictionary proper, often integrated into larger information systems such as spelling checkers, grammars and encyclopedias, is losing its

1

2

In fact, as early as the 1960s, Barnhart (1967: 161), credited with the introduction of the vital criterion of the user perspective into "the stale lexicographic debate" (Hartmann 1987: 12), stated that "it is the function of the popular dictionary to answer the questions that the user of the dictionary asks, and dictionaries on the commercial market will be successful in proportion to the extent to which they answer these questions of the buyer." However, it is only since the mid 1970s that pedagogical lexicography has been gradually strengthening its reputation for the user-centered innovation (Cowie 1984: 163). In their annotated bibliography spanning approximately the last three decades of the 20 lh century, Dolezal and McCreary (1999) refer to 521 publications on pedagogical lexicography. Nonetheless, they conclude that only 14 of them concern experimental studies, "generally controlled with independent variables and a dependent variable and [...] statistically significant results" (McCreary - Dolezal 1998: 613).

3 independence. Even though many contemporary learners of English are computer literate, electronic dictionaries have not yet superseded the conventional, printed reference works. Many pedagogical dictionaries can already be purchased in both formats, for thick volumes are often supplemented with a CD. However, as long as electronic dictionaries do not have "the look-and-feel of a printed dictionary", they might remain supplements to, rather than replacements for, the bound book (Kernerman 2000: 828). It appears, then, that the benefits of the electronic medium notwithstanding, the need for research into the use of conventional, printed learners' dictionaries remains strong. The present dissertation reports on an endeavor to contribute to the experimental research on the use of monolingual English dictionaries in printed form. The conviction that "the ability of words to predict their own environment" (Jones — Sinclair, as cited in Rundell 1988: 135) is of particular interest to the language learner made it possible to focus the study. Moreover, it is common knowledge that complementation patterns are especially important in the case of verbs. After all, the verb, the part of speech which expresses an action, an event or a state, is indispensable for everyday communication. In Jennings's words (as cited in Aarts — Meyer 1996: 1), "[a] verb is a power of all speech, [...] [i]t brings to birth." Since individual English verbs impose specific syntactic and semantic constraints on the constituents they can take, familiarity with their complementation properties is essential for learners to construct correct sentences. It is then a reasonable requirement that comprehensible and easily accessible syntactic information on verbs should be present in dictionaries meant for foreign students of English. 3 The study attempts to examine the user-friendliness of sources of verb syntax in pedagogical dictionaries of English. The accomplishment of this goal not only presupposed a detailed knowledge of the ways of presenting syntactic information on verbs in learners' dictionaries, but also required an empirical investigation into the topic. Thus, it has decided the character of the present work. The dissertation is of both a theoretical and an empirical nature. The theoretical part is based on an analysis of primary sources, i.e., a number of learners' dictionaries: the Grammar of English Words (1938), all the editions of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English (1948, 1963, 1974, 1989, 1995, 2000) and of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1978, 1987, 1995, 2003), the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987), the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary (1995), the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2001), the Cambridge International Dictionary of English (1995), the Cambridge Advanced Learners' Dictionary (2003) and the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2002). 4 Thus, all the editions of the major pedagogical dictionaries have been subjected to scrutiny, including the earliest ones brought out before and in the course of World War II. Still, in view of striking similarities between the Grammar of English Words and the first three editions of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, it is sometimes only the

1

4

The significance of the verb and its syntactic properties is discussed in more detail in section 1.3.1.1. Different titles notwithstanding, the three reference books published by Collins and based on the Collins Birmingham University International Language Database (COBUILD) are in fact three editions of the same dictionary. This is also the case with the two Cambridge dictionaries.

4 most recent, 1974 edition of the latter dictionary that is taken into account in comparative analyses. Then, the in-depth discussion spans the last three decades. Apart from the dictionaries, a number of secondary sources have been referred to in the theoretical part. They comprise mainly papers from proceedings of conferences on lexicography and linguistics and from collections of academic articles as well as reviews and pieces of research published in scholarly journals devoted to lexicography, linguistics and foreign language teaching methodology. Besides, two monographs dedicated exclusively to the topic of grammar in dictionaries have been consulted. The materials in question come, in general, from approximately the same period as the dictionaries discussed. The empirical part of the dissertation relies, in the main, on the results of the statistical analysis of the numerical data yielded by the research. Additionally, reference is made there to specialist publications on principles and methods of conducting research in lexicography and education, books on statistics and the electronic corpora of the English language consulted to design the experiment. With a view to attaining the objective of the dissertation, the descriptive and the comparative methods have been employed. Comparison, indispensable for identifying changes or otherwise in the dictionary treatment of verb syntax, presupposes, and in fact hinges on, prior description thereof. The descriptive method has also been used to evaluate the outcomes of the comparison and explain developments in the presentation of syntactic information on verbs in the learners' dictionaries. Besides, description has been essential for presenting the research design and discussing the results of the investigation. The research itself was based on the experimental and survey methods. A number of statistical tools have made it possible to examine the obtained data and judge the statistical significance of the observed differences. The aim and scope of the present work have determined its structure. The study consists of three chapters. The main body of the first, theoretical one commences with a definition of the user-friendliness of sources of verb syntax in learners' dictionaries. An account of the major tendencies in the presentation of syntactic information on verbs by means of codes, examples and definitions is then offered. The trends are assessed from the vantage point of the dictionary user. An overview of the findings from the most pertinent pieces of research reported in the literature on the subject is provided in the last section. It is also there that the hypotheses tested in the experiment are formulated. The next two chapters comprise the empirical part of the dissertation. Chapter 2 is devoted to the methods used to verify the hypotheses. It gives details on the materials distributed in the course of the experimental sessions and identifies variables. Next, the statistical methods employed to analyze the data collected are outlined. Careful attention is paid to the subjects who took part in the study; the ways of sampling them and assigning to experimental conditions are explained, and the subjects are characterized on the basis of additional information revealed by the survey. Procedures adopted in the course of the experimental sessions are then briefly described. The chapter concludes with the principles of data organization. Results of the investigation are explored in the next chapter. Preliminary findings, concerned with the identification, use and localization of syntactic information on verbs in particular components of the verb entry, also in a few of them at a time, are examined first.

5 The discussion lays the groundwork for the analysis proper, where only individual sources of syntactic information are taken into account. It is there that the majority of the hypotheses are tested and relations are sought about which no predictions have been made. The analysis of the main findings is followed by the examination of ancillary ones, which are related not so much to factors inherent in the microstructure as to subject variables, the outside matter and the data which have fallen outside the purview of the preceding sections. Generalizations about the most important outcomes of the experiment complete the presentation. Finally, the main findings are related to those from other experiments and the most user-friendly solution is recommended. A brief account of possible reasons behind the unpredicted results, the indication of the strengths and weaknesses of the experiment, as well as the call for a better integration of the teaching of dictionary use into English classes conclude the study.

1.2. User-friendliness - a definition The term user-friendliness was coined by Harlan Crowder to refer to the inherent ease, or lack of ease, encountered when running a computer system (OED). Although it has its roots in computer science, the term has become a buzzword in pedagogical lexicography, where it is associated with easy accessibility of information to the dictionary user (Bogaards — Van der Kloot 2001: 98). However, the ease of accessibility is difficult to reconcile with the accuracy of description, since, as a rule, the more detailed the information, the more elaborate the system of presenting it. User-friendliness and theoretical accuracy are thus said to constitute "the poles between which the design of a dictionary will have to find its place" (Herbst 1999: 229), and compromising between the two conflicting demands is believed to come close to a daily routine (Colleman 2002: 67). Heath (1982: 106) maintains that "[i]t is preferable to make users' needs the paramount concern than to aim at a linguistically 'water-tight' description." Colleman (2002: 67) argues in the same vein that in dictionaries for non-linguists the presentation of syntactic properties of verbs should be first and foremost pedagogically sound, even at the expense of theoretical accuracy. Likewise, Lemmens and Wekker (1986: 100) stress the need for a pedagogical approach to verb complementation in learners' dictionaries, even when a purely syntactic analysis or classification would look rather different. No wonder, then, that gains on the side of clarity in the presentation of verb syntax in such dictionaries are said to far outweigh losses on the side of accuracy, and the trade-off is not only acceptable, but also desirable (Rundell 1998: 330). For one thing, in Rundell's (1998: 330) words, it "would be unwise to produce dictionaries that relied on a more active engagement by users [... ] learners want to find information quickly and be able to grasp it immediately once they find it." For another, what they look for is not, as a rule, elaborate syntactic information, e.g., on underlying differences between superficially similar syntactic patterns, but rather some information on surface structure possibilities only (Aarts 1991a: 576). Clear et al. (1996: 313) observe that learners need only to know that a verb is followed by, say, a noun group, an i/ig-clause or a that-clause. Thus, a certain delicacy of syntactic description can safely be sacrificed for clarity. Even when, in consequence, some subtle points of verb

6 syntax are missed out, it should be remembered that a dictionary is not a grammar book and should not strive to be one (Van der Meer -- Sansome 2001: 291). Besides, the fact that reference skills of the average dictionary user are often only rudimentary cannot be ignored (Cowie 1990: 688). Worse yet, although the development of the skills is more than welcome, many attempts to hone them, e.g., by means of dictionary workbooks, bore no fruit (Stark, as cited in Swanepoel 2000: 407). In view of the ineffective efforts to improve the user, it seems only natural that lexicographers try to cater for the actual, rather than the ideal one, and to better the dictionaries they compile. A more pragmatic, (re)design approach is then adopted, which consists in changing the design of existing dictionaries and creating new ones so as to bridge the gap between the sophistication in the monolingual learners' dictionary and the hard-to-change reference skills of its users (Swanepoel 2000: 406). The move towards "utilitarian lexicography" (Rundell 1998: 337), where the needs and the skills of the user are the most important, is so pronounced that any systematic failure of a pedagogical dictionary is believed to be caused by the failure to consider the user. In fact, it is the dictionary user that is expected to dominate the lexicographic scene in the present decade, just as computational lexicography dominated it in the previous one (Kernerman 2000: 826). Apart from dictionary users' needs and reference skills, the strong competition on the market among dictionary publishers as well as the threat to the bound book also provide motivation for improving the user-friendliness of pedagogical dictionaries. The publishers feel hard-pressed to play, as Kernerman (1996: 408) puts it, "a game called 'Who can think of a new feature to include in a new edition?'". Still, bearing in mind that the form and function of learners' dictionaries must be determined by their audience (Tickoo, as cited in Kernerman 1996: 408), it is not only innovations, but also user-friendliness that are introduced into pedagogical dictionaries, mainly in the form of systems for finding what is needed faster and with less effort (Kernerman 2000: 827). In the literature on the subject a few developments in the presentation of verb syntax in learners' dictionaries are described in terms of user-friendliness. For instance, the mnemonic verb codes in LDOCE1 are seen as more user-friendly than the neither mnemonic nor transparent ones used in OALDCE3 (Cowie 1990: 688, Herbst 1996: 322). The transparency of codes in LDOCE2 is believed to further enhance the user-friendliness of encoded syntactic information (Cowie 1999a: 151). The extra column in COBUILD1 has also been labeled user-friendly (Hausmann — Gorbahn 1989:50, Herbst 1996: 322). The departure from codes for verb patterns in LDOCE3 in favor of pattern illustrations spelling out syntactic information in full, praised for their "unrivalled user-friendliness" and recommended as a model to be followed (Heuberger 2000: 65, 184), is another instantiation of the issue under discussion. Unfortunately, the principles which underpin the innovative features introduced into the dictionaries are to a large extent shrouded in mystery. As Swanepoel (2000: 407) puts it, "[o]n what do lexicographers base the perceived FQ [functional quality] of the innovative features they have incorporated in the revised editions of MLDs? [monolingual learners' dictionaries] [...] the answer is: We do not exactly know. Given the stiff competition on the market, lexicographers are rather tight-lipped about their commercial secrets." Indeed, they are reluctant to reveal how the design of their dictionaries was decided by their theoretical disposition, and how by the results of their experiments. Such details are hardly ever made

7 public, despite frequent reference to some form of research underlying newly published dictionaries either in sales materials or in prefaces to the dictionaries themselves. Naturally, as Hartmann (2000: 390) emphasizes, research into dictionary use should provide the framework for all lexicographic production. Nonetheless, it is the intuition and impressions of editors and lexicographers, the least representative dictionary users, rather than results of actual research that are believed to have often determined the quantity and the presentation of information in dictionaries (Tono 2001: 10). In view of the paucity of reports on research that taps the real assumptions or principles that guide many design decisions, the adopted solutions could be considered sources of hypotheses that have to be tested empirically (Swanepoel 2000: 408). This is what Varantola (2002: 33) considers of importance as regards user-friendliness in the field of lexicography: What, then, makes a dictionary user-friendly? There may be no simple answer to this question, as reasons seem to be manifold. Before even attempting to formulate an answer, w e have to decide on the type of dictionary and the type of user we have mind. In addition, we have to determine whether w e are only discussing the way in which dictionaries are used, or are we also attempting to discover how the user benefits from the information available in the dictionary.

It seems that in a study of the user-friendliness of sources of verb syntax in pedagogical dictionaries, the way in which such dictionaries are used by learners to locate syntactic information cannot be divorced from the benefit the information provides, especially in view of the fact that it is encoding that usually motivates the search. However, once the syntactic information found in a dictionary has helped users achieve their purpose, it can be considered useful, but its source may not be user-friendly. T h e utility, or usefulness, of the identified syntactic information is seen as a necessary, although not yet sufficient condition for the user-friendliness of the source which furnishes such information. T h e source should also be referred to very often, or, in other words, it should present the information in a way which would attract users' attention very frequently. Implicit in the above approach is the need for a three-step investigation to assess the user-friendliness of sources of syntactic information. T h e study should concern first - the identification of the piece of syntactic information needed for a specific purpose somewhere in the verb entry; second - the utility of the information found; third - the frequency with which the rightly identified and useful syntactic information was located in particular sources of verb syntax in the entry. Differences in the frequency of reference to such sources reflect the differences in their user-friendliness. The understanding of the user-friendliness of a source of syntactic information in the present dissertation implies that three basic research questions should be answered in a study which aspires to investigate the issue in pedagogical dictionaries by means of the experimental method, namely: 1. Was relevant syntactic information identified in the verb entry? 2. Was the identified syntactic information used correctly? 3. In which source or sources was the useful syntactic information located most often? T h e first two research questions make it possible to gradually narrow down the scope of the study and focus the analysis. T h e crux of the matter is the investigation of the frequency with which various sources of syntactic information were consulted, once the utility of the information they furnish has been proved.

8 The discussion of the design of the experiment which made it possible to answer the questions must be preceded by a brief outline of the most important developments in the presentation of verb syntax in pedagogical lexicography. It is the analysis of such trends in the author's MA thesis (Dziemianko: 2001) that motivated the research. The following sections, structured around the vehicles for syntactic information in learners' dictionaries, highlight the most marked tendencies and offer a review of pertinent theoretical considerations from the literature on the subject. Besides, the sections give an insight into the state of the art in the presentation of verb syntax in the pedagogical dictionaries published in 2001 and later. Although the solutions adopted in the dictionaries did not have a bearing on the design of the study, they are important from the point of view of its relevance. 5 The research is also placed within the framework of the most closely related investigations, which makes it possible to see its novelty value. The hypotheses the study attempted to test are formulated at the end of the chapter

1.3. Trends in the presentation of verb syntax in pedagogical lexicography 1.3.1. Codes 1.3.1.1. Theoretical underpinnings Palmer and Hornby recognized the importance of presenting verb patterns in learners' dictionaries long ago. The two teachers of English in Japan and founding fathers of pedagogical lexicography (Cowie 1999b: 3) were acutely aware of the errors their students made when trying to extend the rules of sentence construction to the cases for which they do not hold. Palmer realized that "[ejxcept by guess-work and chance, the student of a foreign language cannot use a verb correctly in a sentence without knowing to what pattern or patterns it belongs." (GEW: 276). Likewise, Hornby (1956: v) was of the opinion that: [t]he most important patterns are those for the verbs. Unless the learner becomes familiar with these he will be unable to use his vocabulary. He may suppose that because he has heard or seen "I intend (want, propose) to come," he may say or write "I suggest to come" [...] Because "He began talking about the weather" means about the same as "He began to talk about the weather", the learner may suppose, wrongly of course, that "He stopped talking about the weather" means the same as "He stopped to talk about the weather".

There are a number of similar analogies in English which may lead the learner up the garden path and result in errors on both the comprehension and the production sides. In fact, English verbs are especially difficult to master, as many of them are "versatile enough to allow several complementation types" (Quirk et al. 1985: 1168) and "choosy; not all verbs can appear in all sentences, even when the combinations make perfect sense" (Pinker, as cited in Hamdan — Fareh 1997: 197). No wonder that the recognition and the use of the constructions which are permissible with a particular verb are persistent and serious problems for learners of English. The problems should be reckoned with, since the verb is

5

The exact dates when the experiment was conducted are given in section 2.3.1.

9 the syntactic nucleus of a sentence; the complementation features of the verb determine the basic structure of the sentence in which it occurs (Heath 1982: 97, Huang 1985: 62). 6 There is thus no exaggeration in Hornby's (1965: 110) statement that guidance on verb syntax is one of the most useful pieces of information that can be given in a dictionary for learners of English. The guidance means that "grammatical information [...] ooze[s] into a dictionary volume with a view to making the acquisition of language skills painless and productive" (Nguyen 1986: 69). Considering the varied combinatorial properties of the English verb and its significance in a sentence, the conclusion that the best dictionary for learners is one that supplies guidance on syntax, preferably with advice on pitfalls to avoid (Bejoint 1994: 210), appears to be fully justified. The potential of codes for conveying syntactic information in pedagogical dictionaries cannot be overestimated. While the few letters, digits or abbreviations they usually consist of take up little space, they nonetheless "capture fine syntactic detail with great economy of means [...] in a succinct yet informative way" (Cowie 1984: 155-156). The symbols used in codes, whose significance is made plain in the outside matter, represent syntactic variables, which can include functional positions and constituent classes fulfilling those functions. Still, there is a danger that the economy and exhaustiveness codes offer may be vitiated by their opacity and abstract nature as well as by the complexity of the accompanying explanations. It stands to reason that the obscurity of codes and the inability or unwillingness to read and act upon the separate chapters in which symbols are interpreted may mean that the user may not even be aware of the existence of all the information represented by the codes (Strevens 1987: 86, 91). The daunting task of consulting the explanatory section each time the dictionary is referred to justifies the suggestion that coding systems should be transparent, or at least mnemonic, rather than totally opaque. Mnemonic codes would be easy to remember and spare users the trouble of constantly checking the explanatory chart (Heuberber 2000: 61). Transparency, in turn, would make it possible for the learner to tell at a glance what information a code represents (Heath 1982: 106, Herbst 1996: 329, Lemmens -- Wekker 1986: 30). As will be shown below, mnemonic coding systems are not always transparent. Transparency, by contrast, always implies the mnemonic value of codes. The creation of a user-friendly coding system is anything but easy and even the transparency of codes is interpreted in different ways. Cowie (1999a: 150) admits that "[designing grammatical schemes to explain the complex pattern of verbs [...] calls for linguistic expertise, but especially perhaps for ingenuity in presentation, and the willingness to modify - or even abandon - an over-complex description or coding scheme in the interests of greater transparency and usability." Different proposals for making codes accessible to the learner offered in the literature on the subject make it clear that there is some disagreement as to what form of codes would best satisfy learners' needs. Lemmens and Wekker (1986: 9, 13-14) require that any system of coding be self-explanatory, theoryindependent and comprehensive. However, assuming that the dictionary user is familiar with the well-known survey of grammars of English, the authors see no reason to dispense with reference to sentence functions in codes in favor of labels for formal categories. As a

6

The centrality of the verb is the cornerstone of valency theory, advanced in 1959 by Tesniere (Vater 1978:22).

10 matter of fact, in their view, functional and transformational information is an important feature of the presentation of grammar in the pedagogical dictionary. They hold that the use of both formal and functional categories in codes makes encoded information accurate, but is no hindrance to accessibility (Lemmens — Wekker 1991: 231). Conversely, according to Aarts (1991a: 577), making a coding system simple and accessible to the learner means using a minimal number of category symbols only and representing, with their help, surface syntactic structures. Besides, the author suggests that there should be only one symbol for the verb, V (Aarts 1999: 31). 7 Herbst (1999: 243) claims that from a theoretical point of view, it is a moot question whether verb complementation should be described in formal or functional terms. The issue is discussed at length by Colleman (2002: 66-71), who provides sound arguments against functional labels. First of all, such labels are theory-dependent. As the author explains, "[w]hile linguists of widely different theoretical persuasions will be found to more or less agree about what constitutes a noun phrase or an adjective phrase in English, it is impossible to define [...], for instance, direct and indirect object in a theory-independent way." (Colleman 2002: 66). Moreover, it is not always clear whether a postverbal noun phrase should be considered an object, as the decision hinges on the choice of the diagnostics for the object status and the relative importance accorded to them. Clear et al. (1996: 313) remark that there are in fact a multitude of borderline cases where at least two interpretations of the complementation structure of the same verb, and thus different functional symbols, are possible. 8 Functional labels thus involve a lot of interpretation, and the fact that different languages have different grammatical traditions might pose some additional categorization problems. Besides, such labels can be insufficient inasmuch as "among the verbs which subcategorize for a direct object, some verbs allow both nominal and clausal objects while others do not, some verbs allow clausal complementation by both finite and non-finite clauses, while others allow only non-finites, etc." (Colleman 2002: 68). A functional label for a direct object would in all likelihood be of little help to the foreign learner in such cases. Although Colleman (2002: 66, 68) argues that, for these reasons, formal labels are generally better for describing verb patterns, he acknowledges that sometimes formal categories alone do not disambiguate all the patterns. For example, in the sentences he discusses, i.e., (1.2) a. John felt an insect (on his arm), b. John felt a complete fool,

7

8

Reference to the distinction between the transitive and the intransitive classes of verbs, labeled Τ and / respectively, "which every dictionary user is probably familiar with" (Heuberger 2000: 65), is in turn advocated by Heath (1982: 106). Some other authors subscribe to Aarts's (1999: 31) point of view and find the same distinction difficult, ill-understood and useless. They also observe that a number of English verbs, e.g., ergative ones, could be labeled as both transitive and intransitive, and that the two verb categories themselves are far from homogenous (Bogaards 1996: 305, Bogaards 2003: 52, Herbst 1996: 331, Tono 2001: 13), which calls into question the need to represent the verb classes in learners' dictionaries. To illustrate, Clear et al. (1996: 313) point out that there is little agreement as to whether four miles in (1.1) He walked four miles is an object or an adjunct.

11 the underlined constituents are both noun phrases, but they perform the function of an object and a subject complement, respectively. A well-balanced mix of formal and functional labels is what the author finds necessary in such instances to preserve the accuracy of description (Colleman 2002: 71). Still, the user's perspective cannot be ignored. In view of the fact that, as has been mentioned in the preceding section, dictionary users are not interested in underlying syntactic differences between similar patterns, there seems to be no need to account for such differences by means of functional categories in codes. Aarts (1991a: 580) points out that the possibility of giving the same code to verbs that require superficially similar, though in fact syntactically different complementation patterns, opened up by formal codes, is what makes such codes preferable to those where recourse is made to functional categories. Besides, functional labels might in reality presuppose more familiarity with grammar than it would be reasonable to expect of many users (Heath — Herbst 1988: 316). Formal labels alone, in turn, appear to make codes so transparent that dictionary users can learn how to use verbs correctly not only without any knowledge of the names of syntactic functions, but even without reference to examples (Bogaards 1996: 305). Apart from the form of codes, the question of their distribution is also addressed in the literature on the subject. Lemmens and Wekker (1986: 13-14), for instance, stress the need for the same order of codes and examples in entries. Still, when codes are not interspersed among examples but lumped together before the definition, dictionary users are left to their own devices to match the codes thus positioned with appropriate verbal illustrations, which might be anything but easy. The same arrangement of codes and examples might be of very little help when there are more examples than codes. The use of typographic devices separating examples which pertain to one code from those which refer to another one, suggested by Aarts (1991a: 581), might be useful. However, it seems that it is still better when codes and examples are systematically paired, since then learners cannot have any doubts as to which code goes with which example(s) (Aarts 1999: 22, Heath 1982: 106). The main proposals for the distribution of codes in the entry advanced in the literature on the subject and summarized above do not cover all the possibilities explored in practice. These, as well as the evolution of the form of coding systems in English learners' dictionaries are looked at in what follows.

1.3.1.2. Coding systems in learners' dictionaries - an outline Palmer, "not a 'trained professional' or a 'sophisticated theoretician', [...] [but] a dedicated amateur who, all his life, toiled to find answers to knotty problems" (Tickoo 1982: 112), was the first one to incorporate codes into the pedagogical dictionary. In his Grammar of English Words (1938, henceforth GEW), considered a pioneering encoding dictionary (Cowie 1999b: 3), there are 27 verb patterns, each of which is assigned a number. The patterns are explained in appendix one at the end of the dictionary. Palmer's coding system was not copied either in the Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (1942) or later - in the Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English (1948, henceforth OALDCE1), on

12

which GEW is said to have left its mark. 9 Apart from reducing the number of codes to 25, changes were introduced into their grouping and explanation. OALDCE1 is considered a significant improvement on its predecessor not only as regards the explanation of verb patterns in the outside matter, but also the consistency of placing codes in entries (Cowie 1998: 260-261). Virtually the same system as in OALDCE1 was used also OALDCE2 (Cowie 1989a: 589). However, as far as the form of codes is concerned, in both editions of OALDCE and in GEW codes are alphanumeric references to verb patterns explained elsewhere in the dictionaries. More precisely, they consist of the abbreviations V.P. in GEW and OALDCE2 and P. in OALDCE 1, followed by the number of the appropriate verb pattern. In GEW each code is additionally preceded by the cross-reference see. Likewise, in OALDCE3 codes range from VP] to VP25 and are nothing but opaque cross-references to explanatory sections. Some codes are, however, subdivided, as indicated by additional capital letters following the number, e.g., VP18A, VP18B or VP18C. In effect, 51 verb patterns are coded. The ordering of patterns also changed in comparison with the previous editions of the dictionary. Still, in the three editions of OALDCE as well as in GEW, a detailed subclassification of verb patterns was arrived at by taking account not of transitivity in a general way, but of the kinds and order of grammatical structures following the verb. 10 Moreover, in all the dictionaries discussed so far syntactic properties of verbs are indicated in each of their different senses. In view of the similarities in form between the codes in OALDCE3 and those in the two earlier editions as well as in GEW, only the codes from OALDCE3 are taken into consideration below. Although it is claimed in the literature that it was Hornby who made sentence patterns a fact of English grammar (Heath 1982: 96), and the coding systems in the first three editions of OALDCE are considered "the epoch-making feature in English lexicography" (Nguyen 1986: 63), it should be remembered that it was Palmer who first introduced the scheme of verb patterns to the learners' dictionary. It is since then that the coding of syntactic information has been the hallmark of pedagogical lexicography. 11 9

The Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary was first published in Tokyo. As Cowie (1978: 139) explains, in 1948 it was reprinted and published in Britain as A Learner's Dictionary of Current English, and then retitled The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English. This change was necessitated by the publication of two smaller dictionaries for learners in the earlier stages of study, that is The Progressive English Dictionary and An English Reader's Dictionary, both by Hornby and Parnwell. Nonetheless, the Tokyo edition as well as its republished reprinting are usually referred to as the first edition. The second edition was published in 1963 under the same title and it was only in the third one from 1974 that the word Oxford was added at the beginning of the title. Still, for the sake of consistency, the acronym OALDCE followed by a number indicative of the edition will be used for all editions of the dictionary in question. 10 The system in OALDCE3 was at least partly influenced by the verb complementation scheme of A Grammar of Contemporary English by Quirk at al., published in 1972 (Cowie 1998: 263). " Of all the learners' dictionaries published thereafter, only Chambers Universal Learners' Dictionary, brought out in 1980, does not employ any system of codes which would go beyond the labels used in dictionaries for native speakers, i.e., vt and vi (Stark 1999: 29). Cowie (1990: 688) explains that the editors of the dictionary avoided grammatical symbols and chose to extensively exemplify syntactic patterns instead in order to avoid "consumer resistance to information that is not directly accessible". It should also be remembered that it is not GEW, but The New Method English Dictionary (1935, henceforth NMED) that is considered to be the very first learners' dictionary (Cowie 1999b: 3, Summers, as cited in Stark 1999: 29). As an entirely original feature, NMED uses a controlled defining vocabulary: 24000 headwords are defined there with the help of a 1490-item wordstock (NMED: iii). However, the dictionary does not provide even part of speech labels for the headwords, let alone information on verb complementation patterns. The title of the

13 Table 1.1 shows changes in the coding systems in pedagogical dictionaries published in the last three decades. The abbreviations denoting the dictionaries are the ones which are customarily used in the literature on the subject. In each column, the dictionaries are arranged according to the dates of publication, indicated in brackets. To give an insight into the systems, a code for the verb want in the pattern want sb to do sth is provided in each cell. The cells highlighted in bold refer to the dictionaries where only formal categories are represented by symbols accompanying verb symbols in codes. 12 Table 1.1. Types of coding system in learners' dictionaries Neither transparent nor mnemonic OALDCE3 (1974) VP17

Mnemonic LDOCE1 (1978) V3

Transparent COBUILDl(1987) V+O+to-INF

OALDCE4 (1989) LDOCE2 (1987) Tnt Τ [+obj+ to-v]

Pattern illustrations LDOCE3 (1995) [T] want sb to do sth MEDAL (2002) [T] want sb/sth to do sth

CIDE (1995) LDOCE4 (2003) (obj) [T+obj+io infinitive] [T] want sb to do sth

COBUILD2 (1995) Vn to-inf OALDCE5 (1995) V.n to inf OALDCE6 (2000) VN to inf COBUILD3 (2001) Vn to-inf CALD (2003) [T] [+obj+fo infinitive]

Codes in O A L D C E 3 indicate only the ordering of patterns in the total scheme and are thus completely opaque; their form itself can tell the user nothing about the structure of the patterns they designate, let alone about any resemblance between similar syntactic constructions. By themselves, such codes are utterly useless. As Strevens (1987: 78) puts it, "[t]he sad fact is this vast treasure of information is accessible only if one has the key, which lies in the reading the introductory essay and appendices." Ilson (1989: 1976), who holds that coding systems are semiotic systems and, as such, can be analyzed in the same way as the languages they describe, likens the codes in O A L D C E 3 to units that behave like single words. In LDOCE1 and OALDCE4, in turn, codes are mnemonic in that they reveal similarities between patterns. Still, they are not lucid. In LDOCE1 a capital letter denoting the verb

12

revised edition, put out in 1965, i.e., An International Reader's Dictionary, where the question of verb syntax is also non-existent, suggests the explanation. The table is based on tables 3 and 4 discussed by Dziemianko (2002: 220-222).

14 class is followed by a number showing the complementation structure of the verb. 1 3 Importantly, the numbers, although far from immediately comprehensible, have the same meaning irrespective of the combination in which they occur, and therefore constitute a memory aid (Procter 1976: 316). 1 4 Ilson (1989: 1976) compares the string-like codes in L D O C E 1 , such as V3, to an analytical dictionary definition, with V as the genus and 3 as the differentia, both of which are meaningful and independently recombinable. However, the opacity of the numerical symbols implies that, like in O A L D C E 3 , "a lengthy, dizzying list of coded terminology" (Dalgish 1995: 3 3 3 - 3 3 4 ) is indispensable to learn how to use the codes. Nonetheless, their m n e m o n i c value suggests that L D O C E 1 presents syntactic information in a more easily accessible form than O A L D C E 3 . As for O A L D C E 4 , Cowie (1999a: 154), the editor, admits that the coding scheme in the dictionary, completely redesigned in comparison with the previous edition, is not always transparent or user-friendly. Nonetheless, more systematic and detailed, it should be seen as a significant improvement on the one in O A L D C E 3 . Cowie (1992: 344) thought it important that codes should be self-explanatory and that it should be possible for the user to learn the meanings of symbols in a short time. A code in O A L D C E 4 consists of a capital letter denoting the verb class and at least one lower case letter, which represents the complementation structure of the verb. Five capitals believed to be familiar to students and teachers (Cowie 1992: 344) were chosen to denote as many verb classes. 15 Lower case letters denote only formal categories, and, like numbers in L D O C E 1 , are mnemonic; the meaning of the letters does not depend on the context in which they were used.' 6 It was expected that within a short time it would be possible for the learner to recall what all the lower case letters represented simply by looking at them ( O A L D C E 4 : 1555). Although some of them, e.g., a for an adjective phrase, η for a noun phrase or t for a fo-infinitive, do come close to standard part-of-speech labels, and remembering them should not pose any problems, this is not always the case. For instance, / for a ί/ιαί-clause is no doubt far from an instantly recognizable, standard abbreviation for the grammatical structure it represents. Still, unlike in O A L D C E 3 , the symbols in O A L D C E 4 do have some m n e m o n i c value, and,

13

14

15

16

V, the v e r b s y m b o l in the L D O C E 1 c o d e in table 1.1., m a y i m p l y that it stands for v e r b s in general. In fact, it is u s e d to d e n o t e a s p e c i f i c c a t e g o r y t h e r e o f , i.e., verbs w h i c h take "a 2-part D I R E C T O B J E C T . T h e first part is a n o u n l i k e e x p r e s s i o n , a n d the s e c o n d is an i n f i n i t i v e w i t h or w i t h o u t to, an ing f o r m or a p a s t participle." ( L D O C E 1 : x x x i ) . Apart f r o m V, there are 5 other s y m b o l s for the verb in the dictionary: / for intransitive verbs, L for v e r b s w h i c h link subject and its c o m p l e m e n t , Τ for m o n o t r a n s i t i v e verbs, D for ditransitive verbs, that is v e r b s w h i c h take direct and indirect o b j e c t s , and X, u s e d w h e n the o b j e c t of the verb t a k e s a c o m p l e m e n t r e a l i z e d by a n o u n phrase, an a d j e c t i v e p h r a s e or an adjunct ( L D O C E 1 : x x x i i i ) . In the c o d e under d i s c u s s i o n and in any other w h e r e it is u s e d , 3 s t a n d s for a to-infinitive. T h e other n u m b e r s u s e d in c o d e s in t h i s d i c t i o n a r y i n c l u d e 0 - n o c o m p l e m e n t or object, / - o n e or t w o n o u n or p r o n o u n o b j e c t s or c o m p l e m e n t s , 2 - a bare i n f i n i t i v e , 4 - an -ing f o r m , 5 - a ί/ιαί-clause, 6 - a c l a u s e or a p h r a s e i n t r o d u c e d b y a wh-word, 7 - an adjectival c o m p l e m e n t or a noun object f o l l o w e d b y an adjectival c o m p l e m e n t , 8 - an -ed form, 9 - an o b l i g a t o r y adjunct, u s u a l l y a p h r a s e u s e d a d v e r b i a l l y ( L D O C E 1 : x x x i i i - x x x i v ) . C l e a r l y , 0, 1,7, and 9 represent f u n c t i o n a l c a t e g o r i e s . In fact, it is o n l y the s y m b o l C l a b e l i n g c o m p l e x transitive v e r b s u s e d i n s t e a d o f X and the a b s e n c e o f V e m p l o y e d in L D O C E 1 that d i f f e r e n t i a t e the s e t s o f verb s y m b o l s in t h e s e t w o d i c t i o n a r i e s . Herbst ( 1 9 9 6 : 3 3 0 ) c l a s s i f i e s the s y s t e m of c o d e s in O A L D C E 4 , as w e l l as the o n e in L D O C E 1 , as m n e m o t e c h n i c a l . T h e fact that in O A L D C E 4 the structure of verb c o m p l e m e n t a t i o n is r e p r e s e n t e d b y m e a n s o f formal c a t e g o r i e s a l o n e j u s t i f i e s the u s e o f b o l d type in the pertinent cell in t a b l e 1.1. H o w e v e r , both f o r m a l and f u n c t i o n a l c a t e g o r i e s are e m p l o y e d in the e x p l a n a t i o n o f the 10 l o w e r c a s e letters f e a t u r i n g in c o d e s in this dictionary.

15

as Aarts (1991b: 222) observes, once understood, they are unlikely to be forgotten quickly, which makes constant reference to the explanatory section unnecessary. Table 1.1 shows that in the majority of the dictionaries taken into consideration coding systems are transparent; it is clear at a glance what information is conveyed by codes, which consist of mnemonic, logical and self-explanatory abbreviations. However, either formal categories alone or both formal and functional ones are employed there to represent the complementation structure of the verb. It should be noted that in the transparent systems which rely on both categories of linguistic description, functional labels are always in the minority. 1 7 Besides, table 1.1 suggests that when the description of verb complementation in the transparent systems consists of formal categories only, the symbols accompany one symbol for the verb, i.e., V. Such codes therefore epitomize the application of the principles of coding syntactic information formulated by Aarts (1991a, 1999), and discussed above. 1 8 Conversely, when both functional and formal categories are referred to in the symbolic representation of syntactic patterning in transparent codes, different classes of the verb are distinguished and labeled accordingly. 1 9 Ilson (1989: 1976) finds the coding system in COBUILD1 very much phrase-like, since each of its elements, like a word, is meaningful in its own right and can occur in other combinations. Obviously, the transparent systems in the dictionaries published after COBUILD1 can also be likened to phrases. Interestingly, as can be seen from the third column in table 1.1, the codes in the dictionaries with formal codes are virtually the same. Likewise, there is much similarity between the functional-formal codes in the other dictionaries. Moreover, the two groups of codes have some symbols in common. Thus, the use of immediately comprehensible symbols has made codes in learners' dictionaries not only transparent, but also largely

17

18

19

The functional labels in LDOCE2 are: obj, obj(d), obj(i), and in COBUILD!: A for an adjunct, C for a complement and Ο for an object, the total number of symbols accompanying verb symbols in codes in the dictionaries being 13 and 12, respectively. In CIDE, where there are 13 symbols other than those for the verb, only 2 of them, obj and two objects, denote syntactic functions. Although CALD makes use of symbols similar to those in its predecessor, CIDE, and employs the very same functional ones, the label two objects, given for instance in the entry for send, is absent from the inside front cover of the dictionary, where common grammar labels are listed and explained. Importantly, of the 6 dictionaries with transparent coding systems published in the last decade, functional symbols feature only in 2. The foregoing observation does not hold for the mnemonic system of codes, where symbols for formal categories alone can accompany different verb symbols, as is the case in OALDCE4. In LDOCE2, 3 verb classes are designated by distinct symbols: intransitive (/), transitive (T) and linking (L). 4 verb symbols are used in CIDE and 5 in CALD, where, unfortunately, the symbol T, widely used in entries, is not explained in the inside front cover. Μ for a compound verb with a movable particle is the additional verb symbol common to the two dictionaries. On top of that, CALD has the symbol R for reflexive verbs. In all the editions of COBUILD, the situation is even more complicated. Although there are no such symbols there as Τ or /, the symbol V can be accompanied by additional abbreviations, such as ERG or RECIP, to identify the classes of, in this case, ergative and reciprocal verbs, respectively. Still, in the last two editions, additional codes, where only the symbol V is used, are then given to represent syntactic properties of the verbs thus labeled. To illustrate, in the entry for boil (4), the following codes are given in COBUILD2 and COBUILD3: V-ERG; Vn, V. In COBUILD1, by contrast, the code V-ERG in the same entry is not accompanied by any supplementary verb codes. Clearly, in the last two editions, despite the fact that 5 different verb classes are distinguished, formal symbols in the description of the complementation structure accompany only one verb symbol, V. In COBUILD 1, by contrast, the same verb symbol can occur with labels for functional categories, as table 1.1 clearly shows.

16 standardized. This tendency is very much in keeping with Kernerman's (1996: 410) as well as McCorduck's (1993: 21) calls for reducing a wide variety of symbols in pedagogical dictionaries and making them more universal. As the knowledge of standard symbols gained from the use of one dictionary is now to a large extent immediately applicable to another one, learners may be more willing to refer to encoded syntactic information. However, greater transparency of codes entails not only their simplification, but also greater ambiguity. For example, the ditransitive pattern advise sb to do sth, where the indirect object is followed by a ίο-infinitive clause object (Quirk et al. 1985: 1215), is in the mnemonic system of OALDCE4 coded Dn.t, thus, as can be seen from table 1.1, differently from the monotransitive structure want sb to do sth, where the verb complementation is realized by a ίο-infinitive clause with a subject (Quirk et al. 1985: 1193). By contrast, in OALDCE6 both constructions are given the same transparent code, shown in the table. That the constructions do differ is evident, for instance, from the fact that in the ditransitive pattern, unlike in the monotransitive one, the noun phrase preceding the infinitive can become the subject of the passive, e.g., (1.3) a. I advised Mark to see the doctor, b. Mark was advised to see the doctor; (1.4) a. I wouldn't want you to lose your way, *b. You wouldn't be wanted to lose your way (by me) (Quirk et al. 1985: 1193, 1215). Still, in the light of the discussion in the preceding sections, the blurring of the distinction between distinct codes and the types of information they convey for the sake of greater transparency should be assessed positively. The overview of the transparent coding systems would not yet be complete if the extra column, i.e., the margin alongside the entry where codes are positioned in all the editions of the COBUILD dictionary, was passed over in silence. Hailed by Heuberger (2000: 63) as one of the most helpful features of the dictionary with regard to grammar, the extra column was introduced to make the main dictionary text simple and accessible by ridding it of abbreviations, technical terms and different typefaces (COBUILD 1: xi). On the other hand, the extra column offers a clear survey of complementation patterns for a given verb meaning. Consequently, as Heuberger (2000: 63, 73) observes, dictionary users can check there with ease whether a certain complementation structure is permissible and avoid the irksome and laborious search inside the verb entry itself. Carter (1989b: 36), however, is more skeptical about the merits of the extra column and wonders whether it is not "in excess of its use and ahead of its users". In the majority of the other dictionaries with transparent systems, codes are interspersed among examples. In OALDCE5 they are given only in the vicinity of examples, whereas in LDOCE2 and CIDE - also before the definition of a particular verb meaning. In OALDCE6 they are placed either in the proximity of verbal illustrations or, if no other patterns are possible with a verb in a given sense, before the definition (Dziemianko in press). Such positioning of codes was applied also to CALD. There is little doubt that the distribution of codes in the microstructure in the transparent systems is a considerable improvement on the distribution in the opaque as well as the mnemonic ones, where codes are simply lumped together before the definition, even if a given verb sense allows several patterns.

17

The two most recent editions of LDOCE as well as MEDAL almost entirely desist from using codes. While information on the transitivity of verbs is still coded there with the help of the symbols I and Τ given before the definition, the structure of verb complementation is usually spelled out by means of pattern illustrations, or collocations, preceding relevant examples. It is only in LDOCE4 that collocations are listed in a special box when words allow many complementation patterns. The box is then followed by examples, where the collocations, highlighted in bold, are claimed to be easy to find (LDOCE4: xiii). 20 Heuberger (2000: 184) points out that dispensing with codes for verb patterns (which he considers a potential major source of confusion and difficulty), LDOCE3 demonstrated that it is possible to reconcile the opposing demands of user-friendliness and accuracy in the presentation of verb syntax. Admittedly, the system of pattern illustrations showing the complementation structure of the verb has an obvious advantage; it does not require any familiarity with grammatical terminology of the dictionary user. Heuberger (2000: 65) is probably right then when he claims that it makes LDOCE3 an excellent choice for learners who consult their dictionaries only occasionally, as well as for those whose knowledge of grammar is still limited. Still, while the system blurs the distinction between grammar and lexis, thereby making syntactic information apparently more accessible, it does pose problems when it comes to representing intransitive uses of a verb (Herbst 1996: 331). 21 The above discussion, concerning also the most recent pedagogical dictionaries, justifies the conclusion that coding systems have improved appreciably over the years. Reference to the dictionaries published before the 1980s makes it clear that lexicographers did not always pay enough attention to user-friendliness in the presentation of verb syntax. The opacity of codes and the need for explanatory charts without which the encoded syntactic information is virtually useless are an eloquent testimony to the emphasis on the academic aspect of lexicography at the expense of the pedagogical one (McCreary — Dolezal 1998: 615). There is little doubt that Quirk's wry comment to the effect that some of the dictionary features which are central to the lexicographer are decidedly peripheral to the ordinary dictionary user (as cited in Crystal 1986: 78) holds true for the early, very economical and mathematically symmetrical, yet obscure systems of codes in learners' dictionaries. The systems in OALDCE3 and LDOCE 1 are rightly considered useful checklists for lexicographers and a convenient reference for grammarians investigating the syntactic behavior of the English verb, but, unfortunately, they are of little help to the ordinary dictionary user (Ellegird 1978: 236). Language learners can hardly be expected to remember what, say [VP3B] denotes, even if they consult the dictionary frequently and are familiar with the outside matter (Huang 1985: 68). Students are not only unable to recall the meaning of such verb codes, but they are often ignorant of the fact that they convey syntactic information on verbs in the first place. In a survey conducted among students at the universities of Augsburg and Erlangen-Nürnberg, not even half of the subjects were aware of the fact that OALDCE3, which they used at school, supplied syntactic information in the form of verb codes (Herbst — Stein 1987: 120). Likewise, Herbst (as cited in McCorduck 1993: 22) emphasizes that many of the German students of English that he

20 21

See for instance the entry for wan!I (desire). The issue resurfaces in section 2.1.3.2.

18 surveyed did not realize that the codes in LDOCE1 and OALDCE3 concerned verb syntax. The results of Bejoint's (1981) study, based on the answers of over a hundred students of English at the University of Lyon, the vast majority of whom consulted OALDCE3 and LDOCE1, show that, paradoxically, the foreign learners did need grammatical information, but did not appreciate the information offered in the dictionaries. While 53 percent of the informants admitted they looked for such information in their dictionaries, 55 percent of the subjects never used syntactic codes (Bejoint 1981: 215). The study shows as well that hardly any learners read the sections in their dictionaries where the coding systems are explained. In fact, about 90 percent of the students neglected the introductory matter: one third of them did not study it at all and more than half read it only cursorily. Bejoint (1981: 219) concludes ruefully that "monolingual dictionaries are not used as fully as they should be [...] many students are not even aware of the riches that their monolingual dictionaries contain". He also takes note of the fact that "[i]t is for encoding that students need the most information, it is encoding information which is the most difficult to supply, and yet it is the information which students use the least." (Bejoint 1981: 220). This conclusion brings to mind the words of Whitcut (1986: 121): "[w]e are bursting to impart a whole mass of information to a public that does not seem to want to listen. It is sobering to reflect that the user is free to reject the whole thing." Such conclusions should not come as a surprise for many teachers, let alone learners, brush aside minimalized and obscure grammar codes. The majority of the teachers in West's study (cited in Nesi 2000: 73), for instance, acknowledged that they had never even tried to train their classes to use the system of codes either in OALDCE3 or in LDOCE1. Fortunately, today, "lists of codes are replaced with more mnemotechnical indications and word class information tends to disappear to make place for prepositions and other verb complementation elements that are obligatory with a given verb" (Bogaards — Van der Kloot 2002: 747). In fact, coding systems have become not only mnemonic, but also transparent. More often then not, they focus on the formal aspect of verb complementation. Even though the above overview extends to year 2003, the conclusions tally with those of Rundell (1998: 329): "what most current coding systems have in common is that they assume very little grammatical knowledge on the part of users, and they aim to satisfy users' needs in this department without requiring them to consult explanatory tables and charts". Some learners' dictionaries have even gone a step further towards supplying explicit syntactic information. Although they still provide information on the transitivity of the verb by means of codes after the lemma, they present different structural possibilities with the help of pattern illustrations. Another move toward making information on verb syntax more accessible to the learner is evident from the changes in the placement of codes in the entry. Fortunately, different codes bunched together before the definition have become a thing of the past. Today, they are given next to the pertinent examples illustrating the coded structures, and it is only in the most obvious cases, where no confusion is possible, that a single code can precede the definition. Alternatively, codes are positioned in the extra column beside the verb entry, a conspicuous feature of the COBUILD dictionaries. In conclusion, the main changes in the presentation of verb syntax in pedagogical lexicography discussed above, i.e., the transparency of coding systems, the gradual departure from reference to sentence functions in codes and the focus on formal categories

19 instead, the manipulation of the place of encoded syntactic information as well as the replacement of codes by collocations, can be seen as the results of lexicographers' effort to make encoded information on verbs more user-friendly.

1.3.2.

Uncoded syntactic information

1.3.2.1. Examples In the learners' dictionary, syntactic information on verbs is provided not only by codes, but also by means of uncoded sources, that is examples, definitions and "other devices" (Ilson: 1989: 1975), such as usage notes. Although usage notes supply very explicit and detailed information, and, uniquely, make it possible to "overcome the intransigence of alphabetical ordering by relating one lexical item to another" (Whitcut 1985: 77), their selective rather than consistent use in dictionaries makes them only an ancillary source of syntactic information. On the other hand, there is a tendency in pedagogical lexicography to ensure that examples and, increasingly, definitions, mirror encoded syntactic information (Rundell 1998: 329). It is these two sources of verb syntax which typically occur in the microstructure of the verb entry and "(subliminally) reinforce grammatical messages" (Rundell 1998: 330) that are discussed below. The role of examples as a source of syntactic information in learners' dictionaries cannot be overestimated, although in the late 1970s they were considered but a valuable link between the lemma and the illustrative matter in explanatory tables (Cowie 1978: 129). More recently, however, they have been found to be at least as important as codes (Heath 1982: 106, Lemmens -- Wekker 1986: 83). Lemmens and Wekker (1986: 106) emphasize that consistent exemplification of codes makes syntactic information so clear that no reference to explanatory sections is necessary. By the same token, the absence of examples is said to pave the way for confusion and diminish the value of syntactic coding, since "[i]f no example of a pattern is given, the mass of coded information can confuse even the assiduous user who checks the codes" (Heath 1982: 98, 100). Complementarity between these two sources of syntactic information is thus a desired feature of learners' dictionaries. 22 Besides, even when codes are ignored, verbal illustrations are what dictionary users should always be able to safely fall back on. After all, the use of examples, which are independent of any theoretical approach to grammar, does not presuppose any familiarity with coding systems and the meaning of symbols employed in codes, and thus does not require coping with any "complex grammatical apparatus" (Yallop 1996: 511). According to Bejoint (1981: 218), learners indeed refer to examples much more frequently than to codes. Whereas only about 45 percent of the respondents to his questionnaire said that they used codes, as many as 70 percent reported that they read examples. Moreover, many subjects wished their dictionaries had provided more verbal illustrations (Bejoint 1981: 219). Similar results were obtained by Kharma (1985: 89): over 70 percent of his

22

The analysis of the entry for believe in the pedagogical dictionaries published before 2001 shows that the degree of correspondence between codes and examples varies considerably. In fact, only in LDOCE3 and CEDE do the examples and the codes in the selected entry prove congruent (Dziemianko in press).

20 respondents were dissatisfied with the absence of examples and recommended an increase in their number, but only about one third were familiar with the verb patterns in OALDCE3. The development of increasingly transparent coding systems has not reduced the importance of verbal illustrations as it is still stressed that syntactic patterns should be fully illustrated by examples (Cowie 1999a: 151, Tono 2001: 13). Examples are also considered to be more important than definitions: "[l]ike a picture an example can be worth a thousand words of definition" (Creamer, as cited in Nesi 2000: 106). Kirkpatrick (1985: 11) argues that as long as learners receive enough help from verbal illustrations it does not matter if they are unable to cope with definitions. The research carried out by the COBUILD2 team reveals that, more often than not, dictionary users read examples before any meaning explanations (COBUILD2: xxii). Strong preferences for illustrative sentences emerged also in the experiment conducted by Cumming, Cropp and Sussex (1994: 376). The role of examples is tersely summarized by Jackson (1985: 58), who points out that they make grammar, meaning and usage converge, and thus perform a number of functions at once. Examples flesh out the more or less abstract information supplied not only by codes, but also by definitions. Putting encoded information in a concrete form and clarifying meaning, they help in both production and reception. Besides, they supply models to be followed in practice. As they also indicate collocations, examples help learners use the language in agreement with prevalent stylistic norms (Cowie 1989b: 57). Bogaards (1996: 309) stresses that examples are of paramount importance in the case of verbs, since they "show in a practical way how the structural skeleton comes to life". In a necessarily short space they provide information on the transitivity of verbs, their selectional restrictions and the contexts in which they typically occur. This accumulation of functions that verbal illustrations perform makes the task of supplying successful examples, especially with the foreign learner in mind, anything but easy (Drysdale 1987: 213, Rundell 1998: 334). However, today, lexicographers do not have to rely on their intuition to decide what syntactic construction is typical, or even acceptable. Instead, they have huge corpora in electronic form and software tools at their disposal, with the help of which they can gain a good and direct insight into the actual use of the language. Although individual judgment is still important in the study of the material that the corpus throws up, dispassionate number crunching and frequency counts replace human selection at the essential stage where the chunks of language to be studied are identified and extracted from a corpus (Rundell 1998: 320). The distortions that are bound to bedevil any collections of citations selected by hand can thus be eliminated at a key stroke. Still, it should be remembered that, as Guillard puts it in the introduction to CALD (vii), "[t]he corpus resources can give us information, but only good lexicographers can put it into a book that you can make friends with". In fact, despite increasingly accurate linguistic data, intelligent, leading-edge data-extraction software and an increasingly coherent learnerbased philosophy, the pedagogical dictionary is said to be still, above all, the product of high-quality people (LDOCE4: x). The need for overtly pedagogical examples in learners' dictionaries was recognized long ago, when extensive, electronic corpus resources providing raw materials for a reliable description of English were beyond the wildest dreams of the pioneers of pedagogical lexicography. This is how Palmer addresses the issue in GEW (ν):

21

[m]any students of foreign languages [ . . . ] make progress in a language by dint of memorizing examples of the use of that language. Their material for memorizing is generally any or every sentence or phrase that they happen to meet with or that attracts their attention, regardless of the real value or degree of commonness. As a result we find them using rare, odd, quaint expressions unknown to present-day usage [...] We find them at the same time [ . . . ] ignorant of some of the commonest and most useful forms. This Grammar of Words contains [ . . . ] a wealth of phrases, expressions and sentences typical of modern English [ . . . ] The foreign student of English may take any of these and commit it to memory in the knowledge that it is useful and productive [ . . . ] each example memorized may serve as a key to many others.

As early as the mid 1930s, Palmer developed a system of dictionary examples meant to cater for the needs of foreign learners of English. Working on a defining vocabulary, he knew that examples in a list of words would help to convey the meaning of the words. Still, sentences showing the lexico-grammatical patterns by which the words in their senses were realized were even more important to him (Cowie 1999b: 7). In a paper on vocabulary layout published in 1936, Palmer drew a distinction between 'skeleton-type' examples and 'sentence-sample' examples (Cowie 1999a: 58). In GEW, the former, given in a maximally reduced form, begin with a lower-case letter, as for instance in the dictionary entry for beg I (2 ask earnestly, implore, pray): (1.5) beg (sy.) for sg. Cowie (2002: 78) observes that skeleton-type examples, which he also calls minimal lexicalized patterns and syntagmas, should not even be seen as examples if these denote instances of performance, actual or simulated. Skeleton-type examples are the products of simplification and abstraction. Simplification involves "the reduction of a predicate or a phrase pattern to a structural minimum [...] [and has] the effect of stripping away distracting lexical detail and throwing a significant collocation into relief' (Cowie 1999a: 136). In consequence, the examples under discussion are marked, for instance, by the lack of a grammatical subject. Abstraction, in turn, manifests itself in the use of the indefinite pronouns somebody and something, represented by sy and sg respectively, which stand for a wide range of specific noun phrases (Cowie 1998: 262). Skeleton-type examples can also involve listing, whereby alternative words or phrases are introduced, as in the following example in the entry for begin I (2): (1.6) begin the letter [work, day, etc.], or bring: (1.7) bring sg. [sy.] in [out, away, back, up, down, along, across, etc.]. 23 Although skeleton examples make no claim to replicate actual performance, they serve as templates on which learners can model their own utterances, and may be seen as "simple frames with a linguistic function" (Cowie 1995: 286). Showing which elements are fixed, which optional and which substitutable, they prevent unacceptable flexibility and undue rigidity in production. Palmer himself points out that they "show in a concise way the

23

In GEW, square brackets show alternatives and round ones - optional omissions (GEW: xi). Simplification and listing are said to cater especially for dictionary users who, for encoding purposes, want to know just which word or words function at one structural point other than that of the headword consulted, and who should thus appreciate examples reduced to such bare essentials (Cowie 1999a: 137).

22 'construction patterns' (or models for sentence-building), and replace much explanatory matter and terminology" (GEW: xi).24 On the other hand, sentence-sample examples, the second type of examples distinguished by Palmer, are complete, self-explanatory sentences which allow no abstraction or alternation at all and may be regarded as expansions of syntagmas. They are familiar also from the dictionaries published after GEW which stayed close to examples as they were supplied by corpora, as well as from those which offered grammatically complete, but made-up verbal illustrations (Cowie 1998: 262). Whether the examples under discussion are the products of the adaptation of corpus material or pure invention, they are short, isolated sentences, fully intelligible independently of a wider context, and are usually made up of words which, apart from the headword itself, are already familiar to the dictionary user. Hence the alternative name - decontextualized sentence examples (Cowie 2002: 76). Palmer was alive to the fact that the type of examples in a given dictionary would depend on the preferences of its users, and specifically on whether they liked detailed or concise information. He maintained that "[a] lay-out must be in conformity with the requirements of the learner for whose benefit it has been composed." (Palmer, as cited in Cowie 1999b: 8). Consequently, in GEW there are not only skeleton-type examples, but also full-sentence verbal illustrations, such as the one at hide (1): (1.9) She tried to hide her feelings.25 Still, there is no indication in GEW that the sentence-sample examples supplied there are adapted quotations. Presumably, then, they are the products of the author's invention. It should be remembered that GEW is "a specialized dictionary" (Cowie 1999a: 59) inasmuch as it focuses on the core vocabulary of 1000 English words which "present considerable difficulty to the foreign student of English [...] It is in connection with these 1000 words that the great majority of mistakes in grammar and composition are made; it is these 1000 words that prevent the foreign student in the early stages from using English

24

25

Pattern illustrations, discussed in the preceding section, are considered to be descendants of Palmer's skeleton-type examples (Cowie 1999b: 8). It is interesting to note that Hornby developed for OALDCE1 what Cowie (1998: 262) calls a "skeleton clause example", e.g., (1.8) a. to cut steps in a rock, b. to cut a tunnel [road, etc.] through a hill, c. to cut a canal, d. to cut a figure in stone. Cowie (1998: 262) finds Hornby's examples less abstract, and thus more user-friendly, than Palmer's. Nonetheless, he holds that such subjectless clauses, where the verb is in the infinitive form and the modification of the object is reduced to the minimum, are still sufficiently simplified to serve as models for imitation and expansion. However, in the dictionary, examples of this kind also show alternatives as well as options, e.g. the one in the entry for believe (1 J: (1.10) Idon't believe it [you, etc.] (fora moment). Undoubtedly, a list of possible realizations of the complementation structure of the verb in a sentence helps in encoding as it encourages dictionary users to infer the unifying thread of meaning and predict which other lexical items may combine with the verb, thereby enhancing learners' independence and confidence. However, as Nesi (2000: 74) and Fox (1993: 142) note, a degree of artificiality is then unavoidable, since more information than would naturally occur in a sentence is crammed into one example. Besides, the indication of several choices within the complementation structure of one verb, though useful from the productive point of view, may impinge on the communicative value of such examples (Herbst 1996: 327).

23 correctly and effectively." (GEW: iii). In consequence, the dictionary provides "richness and abundance of examples" (GEW: ν). OALDCE1, by contrast, is a large, general-purpose dictionary for advanced foreign learners. Cowie (1995: 285-286) shows that in the run of 506 entries and sub-entries from make (2) to mate (]), there are only 258 examples. 2 6 In OALDCE1, like in GEW, there are phrase and clause examples as well as full sentences, all of which, according to Cowie (1995: 285-286), are allotted particular functions. Phrases and clauses, which, broadly speaking, are skeleton examples, are intended to assist in decoding and encoding. Grammatically complete sentences, on the other hand, which come closer to simulating actual speech or writing, can additionally convey cultural information. 2 7 Hornby (1965: 107-108) approved of the use of invented examples in a learners' dictionary of reasonable size and cost, saying that "[i]f we are to illustrate contemporary usage, invented examples may be more helpful than examples quoted from books and periodicals." He was of the opinion that it is only in made-up examples that lexicographers could include details which would throw light on the meaning and use of lemmata. Such examples, unlike citations, could thus be shaped to better cater for the needs of the learner. Invented examples are supplied not only in OALDCE1, but also in the next three editions of the dictionary. The preface to OALDCE5 reveals that it is only in this edition that use was made of a corpus which, among other things, provided a wealth of raw material on which to base examples. As a result, "[m]any existing examples were rewritten in the light of the new evidence and nearly 9000 new ones were added" (OALDCE5: vi). The introduction to OALDCE6 (vi) indicates that corpus analysis informed the work on this edition as well, but examples make no claim to be simply extracts from the corpus. However, their number has also been increased (Van der Meer — Sansome 2001: 289). COBUILD1, by contrast, the first large dictionary using a corpus systematically and extensively, offers mainly wholly authentic examples. At times, however, examples were edited; sentences from the corpus were shortened and offensive or obscure words were removed. It is only very occasionally that, in the absence of suitable corpus material, examples were invented (COBUILD1: ix, xv). Likewise, in COBUILD2 the majority of examples are direct corpus citations, and "minor changes" meant to make them "more successful as dictionary examples" are only occasional (COBUILD2: xxii). Still, the corpus on which the dictionary is based, ten times larger than the one which underlay the first edition, precluded the possibility of not finding a suitable example there (COBUILD2: viii). Therefore, the editors do not admit to having made up any of the examples included in COBUILD2.

26

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The ratio of examples to lexical units in the same run has almost doubled over forty years, since in OALDCE4 there are 683 examples in 693 units (Cowie 1995: 290). In either edition, lexical units in the run encompass unnumbered and undivided main entries, numbered senses of a main entry, compounds, phrasal verbs and idioms in numbered subdivisions of particular entries, run-on derivatives and zero-derivatives with numbered senses as appropriate (Cowie 1995: 285). Clauses, typically transitive verbs in the infinitive form followed by nominal direct objects, are considered ideally suited to encoding, since, as core collocations, they can be inflected for tense and number and syntactically manipulated (Cowie 1999b: 8). Interestingly, in OALDCE1 the number of phrase and clause examples in the run from make (2) to male (1), i.e. 129, roughly equaled the number of sentences, i.e. 115 (Cowie 1998: 262-263).

24 In LDOCEl examples are, as a rule, invented and, on top of that, phrased in the defining vocabulary of the dictionary. However, those for structural words are cited directly from the files of the Survey of English Usage (LDOCEl: x-xi, xxvi). In the next edition, verbal illustrations are "often based on the analysis of the authentic language in the Longman Citation Corpus" (LDOCE2: F9). The introduction to LDOCE3 makes it clear that, while all the examples in the dictionary are based on corpus analysis, some of them "have been taken direct from the corpus; some have been changed slightly to remove difficult words; and some have been written directly for the entry" (LDOCE3: xvi). Bogaards (1996: 299) claims that, as regards the English learners' dictionaries published in 1995, many of the examples in LDOCE3 as well as OALDCE5 still stem from the lexicographic tradition and were composed by lexicographers. He finds COBUILD2 an epitome of corpus work, and CIDE a mixed case. 28 Bogaards (1996: 298) also notes that examples in COBUILD2 and CIDE are longer and less stereotyped than those in LDOCE3 and OALDCE5. As for the dictionaries published after 2001, the prefatory matter to COBUILD3 (xv) makes it clear that the policy adopted there with regard to examples is exactly the same as in COBUILD2. In LDOCE4 all examples in the printed dictionary are based on the Longman Corpus Network, but they are usually slightly edited versions of real sentences from the corpus (LDOCE4: x). 29 CALD, in turn, tells the dictionary user nothing specific about the source of its examples. Although it mentions the Cambridge International Corpus (CALD: vii), it is not stated clearly to what use it was put as regards examples. Nonetheless, brackets and slashes, e.g., in the examples for cap (limit) and exorcize: (1.12) High spending councils have all been (rate/charge) capped and (1.13) After the priest exorcized the spirit/house/child, apparently, the strange noises stopped, imply that authentic sentences must have been adapted. Finally, examples in MEDAL are also edited versions of corpus material. Although Bogaards (2003: 50) finds them in general easy to understand by advanced learners, he nonetheless points out that more could have been done in this respect. He also notes that whole sentences prevail, but examples in the form of phrases are not uncommon. 30

28

29

30

Baugh, Harley and Jellis (1996: 43) emphasize that "examples, which are at the heart of CIDE, are corpus-based". Not even 5 percent of the approximately 100000 examples in the dictionary were taken directly from the corpus. It is estimated that from 70 to 75 percent of the examples were derived from or inspired by the corpus in an attempt to achieve a balance between clarity and naturalness. The remaining ones were composed with reference to corpus material only for the most basic structural pattern, and are often the first, the simplest examples in an entry or illustrate alternative grammatical structures, e.g., (1.11) a. She gave her nephew five pounds, b. She gave five pounds to her nephew (Baugh - Harley - Jellis 1996: 43—44). The CD-ROM with the electronic version of the dictionary contains the Longman Examples Bank with a further 80000 examples. The examples are all corpus based and come from other Longman dictionaries. Additionally, the Bank on the CD-ROM offers also over 1 million sentences from the corpus which have not been edited (LDOCE4: x). Interestingly, in the dictionary there is a clear distinction between lexical units on the basis of their frequency, that is between the 7500-word productive, core vocabulary and "less frequent words that many users will never even encounter, and few will ever need to use productively" (MEDAL: x). This 'dual-track' approach, as it is called, is claimed by the editors to have great benefits for the

25

Obviously, as (Cowie 2002: 75) notes, instances of actual performance played virtually no role in pedagogical lexicography until the corpus-based dictionaries of the late 1980s. Then, the practice of relying on a corpus in the process of dictionary-making, seen at first as a maverick departure (Clear et al. 1996: 308), was adopted as standard, so that any pedagogical dictionary published in the last decade has a corpus as its basis. The extended use of authentic material as a starting point to illustrate collocational features, selectional restrictions and stylistic characteristics of words is seen as one of the innovative design features of learners' dictionaries (Swanepoel 2000: 407). In fact, today, there is no point in characterizing the pertinent lexicographic debate as concerning a simple choice between the authentic and the invented, or, as Stein (1999: 45) puts it, between examples drawn from corpora and non-corpus-based. 31 It appears that "the differences now lie in the degree to which corpus material is 'processed' on its way into [...] examples" (Rundell 1998: 334). According to Laufer (1992: 72), the issue of contention boils down to the question whether dictionary examples should be edited corpus citations modified for low-frequency words, or whether they should be corpus-oriented, which means that the corpus would be a guideline to lexicographers, who would be free to compose their own examples on its basis. Laufer (1992: 75-76) argues for the latter option and believes that "a group of lexicographers working together and consulting a language corpus should be able to suggest examples which are typical, natural, thought-provoking and surrounded by typical context". It is on the basis of such examples that language learners could use new words in new contexts in sentences which have never occurred before, and thereby the ultimate goal of teaching will be achieved. Modified citations from corpora, are, in the author's view, of a much lower pedagogical value in this respect. The findings from the experiment she carried out among 57 adult learners from different departments at the University of Haifa suggest that examples composed by lexicographers are to some extent pedagogically more beneficial indeed. For one thing, they proved more helpful in decoding. For another, their usefulness turned out to be less dependent on the learners' vocabulary level. In fact, it is only in

user: productive vocabulary is described in depth, while the brevity of receptive entries makes it possible to include many infrequent words. This is how the approach is justified: [tjhere has never been a more exciting time to produce a new dictionary. Everything is changing and expanding: the English language itself, the technology that helps us to describe it, and the needs and goals of people learning and teaching English [ . . . ] the quality, range and sheer volume of available corpus resources has increased dramatically. This means that we are in a better position than ever before to provide a description of English that reliably corresponds to the way that people speak and write the language. Along with these benefits come fresh challenges. The amount of data at our disposal continues to grow, yet the physical size of printed dictionaries remains constant. We have been guided here by research into dictionary users' needs and skills, taking special account of the differences between the receptive and productive needs of advanced learners (MEDAL: x).

31

In effect, only productive entries offer examples in MEDAL. Bogaards (2003: 50) rightly observes that whereas such a policy is acceptable from the productive point of view, it is questionable as far as the receptive side is concerned, since examples also help to clarify and disambiguate meaning. This distinction is discussed for instance by C o w i e (1989b: 5 5 - 6 3 ) , Fox (1993: 144) or Landau (1989: 165). It is interesting to note that in the study conducted by Rundell and Maingay (as cited in Laufer 1992: 7 2 - 7 3 ) not only teachers of English, but even native speakers of the language who were not teachers were unable to spot the source of examples for 25 words and discriminate between authentic ones and those made up by lexicographers.

26 production that the type of examples did not significantly affect performance. Still, the lack of statistically important differences on the side of production implies that more authentic examples might be equally good as models of use as more traditional ones. This is how C o w i e (1999a; 137) sees the use of corpora in the process of making examples: [t]he lexicographer's approach to the use of corpus data for examples needs to be flexible [...] Throughout the 1990s, corpus linguists have tended to move beyond the position taken up by COBUELD researches in the 1980s, when analysis was strongly data-oriented and there were certainly expectations on the part of some investigators [...] that a radically new categorization [...] would emerge. There is a new flexibility of approach apparent in the present widespread collaboration between lexicographers, theoretical linguists and corpus linguists. Rundell (1998: 3 3 4 - 3 3 5 ) argues that as far as examples are concerned, there is now something not too far from a consensus in actual working practices. T o see h o w this consensus manifests itself today, Rundell's comparison of the examples for the core meaning of kill from O A L D C E 5 and C O B U I L D 2 is extended below to the other dictionaries published no earlier than 1995. The examples compared are given in table 1.2. 3 2 Table 1.2. Examples for the core meaning of kill in the learners' dictionaries published since 1995 Dictionary

Examples

OALDCE5

Careless driving kills. \ He was killed with a knife. \ Cancer kills thousands of people every year. \ We need something to kill the weeds.

More than 1000 people have been killed by the armed forces. \ Cattle should be killed cleanly and humanely. \ The earthquake killed 62 people. \ Heroin can kill. His parents were killed in a plane crash. \ What's the best way to kill weeds? \ Drug LDOCE3 abuse can kill. Her parents were killed in a plane crash. \ She killed her husband after years of abuse. \ CIDE Just a tiny drop of this poison is enough to kill. \ Food must be heated to a high temperature to kill harmful bacteria. Cancer kills thousands of people every year. \ Three people were killed in a crash. \ I OALDCE6 bought a spray to kill the weeds. \ Excessive tiredness while driving can kill. COBUILD2

COBUILD3 LDOCE4

CALD MEDAL

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More than 1000 people have been killed by the armed forces. \ Cattle should be killed cleanly and humanely. \ The earthquake killed 62 people. \ Heroin can kill. Why did she kill her husband? \ Murray held a gun to his head and threatened to kill him. \ Four people were killed when the train plunged into a flooded river. \ The driver was killed instantly. \ Bleach kills household germs. \ Smoking kills. Her parents were killed in a plane crash. \ Smoking can kill. \ She killed her husband after years of abuse. Each year thousands of people are killed and injured on the roads. \ Many people believe that killing animals for sport is morally wrong. \ Speed kills.

Rundell (1998: 334) does not compare examples for the reflexive, informal and figurative uses of kill. Therefore, they are not taken into consideration in what follows.

27 As can be seen f r o m the table, the examples convey extensive grammatical information. They show that kill can be used both transitively and intransitively in the same meaning and that it often occurs in the passive. They also reveal that the subject can be a human agent, but also an illness, an event, a drug or even a type of behavior. T h e object, in turn, can be a human, an animal as well as a plant. T h e examples also indicate a range of typical contexts in which the verb can be used. Rundell (1998: 334) concludes on the basis of the examples from O A L D C E 5 and C O B U I L D 2 that all of them "do an excellent job [...] [tjhere is not a great deal to choose between these accounts". This conclusion applies also to the foregoing selection of examples, which are similar inasmuch as they are self-sufficient, fully comprehensible sentences conveying clear information on the syntactic properties of the verb, its selectional restrictions as well as the context of use. Typically produced by modifying sentences which actually occurred, they sound natural and focus on important linguistic points without baffling the dictionary user by introducing mystifyingly irretrievable contexts. Finding sound grounds for preferring the examples in one dictionary to those in any other is indeed difficult, if not altogether impossible. Overall, examples in the contemporary learners' dictionaries should be seen as a praiseworthy achievement. On the one hand, there is no conceivable reason why lexicographers should fall back on their intuition when large and diverse corpora are available to instantiate the points that need to be made. After all, the odds are that, as Fox (1993: 148) puts it, "when we sit and intuit how words are used - we are likely to get it wrong". 3 3 Moreover, reducing raw corpus material to essentials in a pedagogical example may be more effective than providing superfluous detail in the n a m e of authenticity. Minaeva (1992: 78) points out that the pedagogical example, "a demonstration of the word's functioning in a learners' dictionary", should be unequivocal and stylistically neutral, so as to give the foreign learner the clearest idea of the possible use of the headword. That is why it must not be overloaded with irrelevant extralinguistic information present in corpus citations, which is likely to puzzle foreign dictionary users and, when imitated, make them sound funny. Still, Cowie (2002: 77) warns against sacrificing linguistic naturalness for explanatory fullness and holds that a perfect balance is struck when illustrative examples illuminate the meaning of lemmata, do so without reference to a context, but remain convincingly natural. Such examples have the advantage over real-life utterances, which "are not neat little isolated wholes [...] [but] carry a lot of loose ends they follow on from what has been said and they lead in to what will be said" (Fox 1993: 144), and thus reveal their full meaning only in a wider context. Besides, the physical limits of a one-volume print dictionary create the need for isolated and self-sufficient examples, which would not refer outside themselves for compete elucidation. Therefore, the crux of the matter "is to say enough and n o more" in any verbal illustration (Williams 1996: 504). After all, as Herbst (cited in Heuberger 2000: 53) points out, the mere appearance of a sentence in a corpus is not yet bound to make it a good example. It is the experienced

33

Laufer (1992: 72), by contrast, holds that lexicographers, w h o are well-educated native speakers, are bound to have correct intuitions about their mother tongue. Still, it is possible that the intuitions, correct as they are, may not reflect what is typical in the language, and it is at this point that corpora come in handy. Extensive corpus resources make it possible for lexicographers to check, for example, whether the subject or the object of a verb is more often a person or a thing, and, if a person, whether names or pronouns are more frequent.

28 lexicographer who can emphasize relevant elements and avoid redundant and distracting information, such as infrequent words or proper names. The latter, as well as the usually excessive length of citations from corpora, may obscure the information on the complementation structure of the verb, which, in consequence, may remain beyond the grasp of the average language learner. 34 In sum, it appears that Carter's (1989a: 151) view that strict adherence to a corpus is not a pedagogical process, but should initiate one, has many supporters among lexicographers. Nowadays, it is both the raw linguistic material offered by corpora and the expertise of lexicographers, rather than either of them on its own, that influence the ultimate shape of examples for learners. As a result, examples supplied by all recent pedagogical dictionaries seem to cater well for learners' needs and any differentiation between the dictionaries on the basis of the examples they offer is indeed difficult. The consciously pedagogical orientation of examples, evident also in the earliest learners' dictionaries, thus remains a distinctive feature of the corpus-based learners' dictionaries published today.

1.3.2.2. Definitions MacFarquhar and Richards (1983: 113) identify three commonest methods of defining in monolingual dictionaries, i.e., defining by synonyms, by explanation and by contextualization. The synonym method consists in providing words possibly closest in meaning to the definiendum. Explanation boils down to furnishing analytical definitions. An analytical definition, also known as Aristotelian or traditional (Bejoint 1994: 198), includes the genus proximum (a hyperonym denoting the superordinate class to which the definiendum belongs) and differentia specifica, where the characteristic semantic features of the word being defined are given to distinguish it from other lexical items in the same class (Ayto 1983: 89). 35 Contextualization, in turn, involves fusing the definiendum and the definiens in a full-sentence, contextual definition (Weinreich 1967: 40). All three methods are used in pedagogical lexicography, where there is said to be an accretive process whereby the quality of definitions, which have also benefited from corpus data, is being gradually transformed for the better (Rundell 1998: 331). It is emphasized that, if a dictionary is to serve learners efficiently as a comprehensionproduction tool, it should include all lexical-semantic information that has an important bearing on appropriate language use, and without which "even the most elaborate grammatical information is lame" (Jain 1981: 284). One essential part of the information which makes words available to the learner for appropriate use in the productive mode concerns selection restrictions (Jain 1981: 280). The synonym method is far from reliable in

34

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See Hausmann and Gorbahn (1989:46) for verbal illustrations from COBUILD1 which apparently were not provided with the needs of the foreign learner in mind. The authors conclude that authentic quotations "can cause great problems and indeed turn out to be a handicap in a learner's dictionary. For it is not authenticity that is decisive, but the didactic power of its examples." (Hausmann - Gorbahn 1989: 46). Thus defined, the analytical definition can be equated with the definiens, i.e., an explanation intended to represent the lexical-semantic properties of a definiendum (Burkhanov 1998: 56). However, the term definition may denote both the definiendum and the definiens; in the broadest sense, it refers to the whole entry except for the lemma (Burkhanov 1998: 57).

29 this respect. First of all, as Cruse (cited in Walter 1992: 129) points out, "[o]ne thing becomes clear when we begin a serious quest for absolute synonyms, and that is that if they exist at all, they are extremely uncommon." Defining by "unilexemic definientia" (Gold 1983: 145) is thus discouraged especially in dictionaries for learners, who are likely to be ignorant of the distinguishing features of near-synonyms, and can thus be easily led to use the words inappropriately (Walter 1992: 129). 36 Even when lemmata are contextualized in examples, the learner is in no position to see the meaning differentiation between them and their near-synonyms sufficiently clearly for successful productive use. It is believed that "[u]nless the learner is given a clear idea of the overlapping and distinctive areas of meaning of such words, he cannot handle them with assured productive control. The 'synonymous' definition again fails him" (Jain 1981: 279). Besides, the listing format implies that the relationships between the words are essentially paradigmatic and neglects, among other things, the syntagmatic relations that they enter into (Scholfield 1979: 56). Overall, the synonym method of defining, no doubt attractive for its brevity, is said to promote false equivalences and is not advisable not only in dictionaries for learners, but, in Scholfield's (1979: 57) opinion, also in those for native speakers. Inaccurate and misleading though it is, routine reliance on synonyms in definitions is typical of most pre-corpus pedagogical dictionaries (Rundell 1998: 331, Scholfield 1979: 54). The following definitions of conduct and see from OALDCE3 and LDOCE1, respectively, illustrate the application of this method in the early dictionaries for learners: (1.14) conduct ~(1) lead or guide; (2) control, direct, manage, (1.15) see -(3) to understand or recognize; (4) to (try to) find out or determine, (5) make sure, take care; (10) to visit, call upon, or meet. Today, synonyms are still used in pedagogical dictionaries, but their role has become ancillary for they often merely accompany other types of definition. 37 Ilson (1987: 71) succinctly summarizes the problem associated with constructing dictionary definitions: "[t]o match a lexical unit with a single phrase whose content is appropriate semantically and whose form is appropriate syntactically is perhaps the most demanding task in lexicography." In the literature on the subject great importance is attached to defining verbs, which, on account of their polysemy and complex combinatorial properties, are said to be the most difficult words to define (Kipfer 1984: 87). Still, there are principles which govern the presentation of syntactic properties of verbs in analytical definitions. First of all, as any analytical definition should be substitutable for the word being defined, the head of the defining phrase should ideally belong to the same word class as the definiendum (Jackson 2002: 94). Besides, transitivity of the verb needs to be reflected as far as possible in the syntax of the definition (Svensen 1993: 129). An intransitive verb must be defined intransitively, and a transitive one - transitively.

36

37

Walter (1992: 130-133) identifies seven types of disambiguating information which help to recognize distinguishing features of near-synonyms, i.e., semantic nuance, context, collocation, fixed phrases, grammar, register and users' attitude. In OALDCE6, for instance, synonyms are given after analytic or contextual definitions and are introduced by boxes with the letters SYN. In LDOCE4, they also follow such definitions and are preceded by the equals sign. See, for example, illustrate (3), imagine (3) or nominate (2) in OALDCE6 and cast (14), (18), impound or sack' ( I ) in LDOCE4. In the COBUILD dictionaries, synonyms are placed in the extra column.

30 There are two ways of defining intransitively: either by using an intransitive genus or by including an object of a transitive one (Landau 1989: 142). It should be stressed that when the genus is transitive, the object of the action mentioned in the definition is obligatory and must go along with the definition when the latter is to replace the headword in continuous text, e.g., (1.16) faint (I) - suddenly lose consciousness (Svensen 1993: 129). Conversely, transitive verbs should be defined by other transitive verbs or "syntactically equivalent constructions" (Zgusta 1971: 258). The form of the definition should make it clear that an object is required to complete it and should suggest the nature of the object (Landau 1989: 141). Lexicographers have developed the convention of the incomplete definition, the definition with a hole in it, to show the incompleteness of the transitive verb, which, as a headword, is not accompanied by an object (Ilson 1985b: 165). Thus, as long as a transitive definiendum does not impose any restrictions on its object, a syntactically intechangeable analytic definition does not show any object of the action expressed in the definition. The following definition of the transitive marry, formulated in line with the 'hole'-convention, illustrates the technique: (1.17) marry (T) - to be united with in matrimony (Kipfer 1984: 88). Obviously, in this incomplete definition there is a hole after the preposition with, and it is this hole that must be filled out by the object of marry.38 Ilson (1985b: 165) points out that lexicographers have made the following proportional equivalence: (1.19) transitive verb : direct o b j e c t : : preposition : object of preposition, "which explains precisely why lexicographers use prepositions without their objects in the definitions of verbs without their objects." 3 9 Apart from the 'hole'-convention, which makes it possible to deal with transitive complementation, lexicographers have developed another sort of definitional convention, the 'specified'-convention, to take account of obligatory adverbials following both transitive and intransitive verbs. A phrase beginning with a specified is crucial in this respect since it is such a phrase that indicates that an adverbial must be present, e.g.,

38

39

The alternative explanation for the lack of an object which would be part of such a definition is that in an actual context, the place of the object of a transitive definiendum is already occupied. Therefore, there is no room for it in any syntactically interchangeable definition (Svensen 1993: 130). A corresponding complete definition of the intransitive marry, with a transitive genus and its object, makes it possible to see the differences in defining the two verb classes: (1.18) marry (I) - to take a husband or wife (Kipfer 1984: 88). Dson (1985b: 165-166) shows that the 'hole'-convention may be applied also to defining verbs which take clausal, rather than nominal objects. The definition of hope: (1.20) hope (T) - to expect with desire, is a case in point. Dson (1985b: 166) explains that the verb expect, like hope, takes a //«//-clause for an object, and that the definition is incomplete inasmuch as it allows space for a following thatclause, but does not include the word that itself. The presence of the genus which occurs in the same pattern as the definiendum is to be sufficient for the dictionary user to conclude that the pattern of the genus applies to the definiendum itself. Still, it should be remembered that in the same sense, expect can also take a nominal object, as in: (1.21) We are expecting a rise in food prices this month (OALDCE6). Hope, by contrast, cannot be used in this pattern, although it can occur in the pattern hope for sth, e.g.: (1.22) We are hoping for good weather (LDOCE4). Unfortunately, on the basis of the definition in (1.20), the learner may conceivably extrapolate the use of a nominal object from the genus to the definiendum.

31

(1.23) a. put (Τ) - to place in a specified position or relationship; (e.g., ~ the book on the table), b. put (I) - to take a specified course; (e.g., ~ down the river) (Ilson 1985b: 167). Clearly, the definition of the transitive verb in (1.23a) illustrates the application of not only the 'specified'-convention, but also the 'hole'-convention, as evidenced by the lack of any object of the action of placing. The one in (1.23b), in turn, is a complete definition of the intransitive put used with an obligatory adverbial. Besides the conventions for showing the syntactic sub-categorization of verbs by means of the analytical definition, there are conventions for indicating the selectional restrictions of the definiendum. A typical object, which gives the learner an idea of the kind of object a verb takes without specifying one (Kipfer 1984: 90), as well as the only object of a transitive verb should be put in brackets and inserted into the 'hole' in the definition. Brackets are of crucial importance here since they show that the objects they enclose, although associated with the verb, are not part of the definition itself (Ilson 1985b: 167). Only the part outside brackets should then be regarded as substitutable for the headword. Svensen (1993: 130) gives the following definitions to illustrate the technique: (1.24) bequeath (T) - leave (property) by will, (1.25) braise (T) - steam (meat) slowly in a closed container. The convention for specifying semantic properties of objects by means of brackets in analytical definitions provides also a collocational clue, since it may help confirm that the appropriate verb sense has been found (Kipfer 1984: 90). However, it may cause problems in the case of verbs which can be used both transitively and intransitively in the same meaning. In the traditional approach priority is given to syntax and the two verb uses are separated, e.g., (1.26) a. cook (I) - prepare food by heating, b. cook (T) - prepare (food) by heating (Svensen 1993: 130). Not only is such a method space-consuming, but it also disguises the fact that in (1,26a) and in (1.26b) the verb means essentially the same. The demands of brevity, complete semantic description and syntactic substitutability suggest the need for a joint definition of the verb, like the one from LDOCE2: (1.27) cook (I;T) - to prepare (food) for eating by using heat. Svensen (1993: 130) explains that in this case the bracketed component should be regarded as part of the definition only if the definition applies to the intransitive use of the verb. Needless to say, such a reading of definitions of this type might reauire much more of the average dictionary user than could be reasonably expected of them. Selectional restrictions on the subject, in turn, can be indicated by means of notes (used of an X), guide phrases (of an X) and adjuncts (as of an X) (Kipfer 1984: 90). Guide phrases, presumably in view of their economy, are quite frequent in learners' dictionaries, including the most recent ones, e.g., (1.28) set-(16) (of a plant) to form or develop seed or fruit (OALDCE2), (1.29) bounce - (2) (of a person) to jump up and down on sth (OALDCE6),

40

See section 2.1.3.1 for principles of defining ergative verbs and verbs which allow indefinite object deletion. Joint definitions of transitive and intransitive uses of the same verb, similar to the

one in (1.27), are common in CDDE. See for instance cook, jostle or play [game].

32 (1.30) ovulate - (of a woman or female animal) to produce an egg from which a baby can be formed (CALD). (1.31) play - (esp. of children) to spend time doing an enjoyable and/or amusing activity (CIDE) Nonetheless, one of the most recent pedagogical dictionaries, MEDAL, employs more space-consuming notes, as is the case in the following definitions of inspect: (1.32) a. used about an official who checks that things are in the correct condition or that people are doing what they should, b. used about a military officer who looks at soldiers in order to check that their appearance is satisfactory. The convention for using brackets to show semantic restrictions on the subject or the object of a verb stems from the fact that, as Hanks (1993: 118) observes, the traditional definition is like an equation; the assumption that the left-hand side of the equation must consist of just the word being defined necessitates the shift of everything that typically goes with the definiendum to the right-hand side. Thus, typical subjects and objects collocating with the headword are not in their respective positions, but are put in brackets and placed where they do not naturally belong, on the wrong side of the equation. This "extradefinitional material" (Walter 1992: 134) conveys a large amount of information within a very confined space and provides a clear visual link with the specific choices illustrated in examples (Cowie 1999a: 161). Besides, brackets may enclose a number of general terms suggesting a range of particular words collocating with the lemma, which learners can use as the basis for their own acceptable choices (Cowie 1984: 157). This is clearly the case in the following definition: (1.33) hatch - (I) (of a young bird, fish, insect, etc.) to come out of an egg (OALDCE6). It stands to reason that on the basis of the guide phrase the dictionary user can come to the conclusion that chicks, chickens, goslings or even young turtles can hatch. Still, although such compression techniques help to achieve precision and save space, they also make the explanatory style condensed and definitions difficult to understand. For instance, in the following LDOCE1 definition of save discussed by Rundell (1999: 43): (1.34) save - (4) to make unnecessary (for (someone)), the double set of brackets is meant to indicate that the beneficiary of the action can be either implied or stated. The unbracketed part of the definition, in turn, suggests the need for a direct object. Rundell (1999: 43) rightly observes that "[i]t takes considerable effort to train lexicographers to be able to express ideas in this way, yet the hapless learner - operating in a language not his or her own - is expected to be expert at decoding such arcana." Besides, it has been pointed put that the use of brackets in definitions presupposes some familiarity with formal logic (Rundell 1999: 43); the practice has also been criticized as a departure from ordinary written English (Hanks 1993: 116). A definition such as (1.34) creates the impression that the lexicographer(s), as it were, took down "from the shelf a standard formula and built the definition around it" (Rundell 1999: 44). Oddly enough, although none of the words in such a definition is difficult, the overall effect leaves a lot to be desired. Rundell (1999: 44) ventures the statement that definitions in early learners' dictionaries, due to the heavy reliance on conventional defining formulae, compression techniques and a limited, and therefore imprecise, defining

33

vocabulary, were even less helpful than those in the better type of native-speaker dictionary. Indeed, the traditional separation of the definiendum from the definiens and concern for space imply that analytical definitions require rules which make them look as if they were written in another language. However, entrenched defining techniques, which subordinate usability to precision and space constraints, impede understanding, and semantic as well as syntactic information is conveyed in a needlessly indirect fashion (Rundell 1988: 133). Explanations of this type cannot be reasonably expected "to be assimilated into the general repertoire of the user" (Sinclair 1991: 135). Rundell (1999: 43) notes that it was not until the 1980s that learners' dictionaries began to seriously break with the tradition of using brackets in analytical definitions. Nonetheless, as can be seen from definitions (1.28)—(1.31), even in recent pedagogical dictionaries brackets are still used to indicate semantic constraints imposed on the subject. With a view to identifying changes in showing restrictions on the object, analytical definitions of inspect from the selected learners' dictionaries are collated in table 1.3. Table 1.3. Analytical definitions of

inspect

Date Dictionary Definitions 2 P2

PI AFO

86,3 AFOC

Ζ test S 77,5 3,066

AFUN 77,8 AFUNC 76,3 0,448 CFO

73,0 CFOC

FORM OF CODES H0:Pl=P2;Hi:Pl#P2

67,6 1,604

CFUN 65,7 CFUNC 64,0 0,485

-

PI AFO

P2 86,3 AFUN

Ζ test S 77,8 2,890

AFOC 77,5 AFUNC 76,3 0,368 CFO

73,0 CFUN

DEFINITION T Y P E Ho:Pl=P2; H,:P1#P2

65,7 2,099

CFOC 67,6 CFUNC 64,0 1,020

PI

P2

Ζ test S

AFO

86,3 CFO

73,0 4,362

AFOC

77,5 CFOC

67,6 3,035

_ AFUN

77,8 CFUN

65,7 3,471

AFUNC 76,3 CFUNC 64,0 3,658

_

-

Unlike in the group of the HSS, the change of the place of formal codes in the dictionary which featured analytical definitions produced a statistically significant effect on the consultation of examples by the US: when the codes were in the extra column, the subjects' reference to verbal illustrations was much less frequent than when they were inside entries. The form of codes also had a significant bearing on the dependent variable in question, provided that they were embedded in the entry. In fact, when the codes thus positioned were of the functional type, examples were referred to significantly less often than when the codes were formal ones, irrespective of the type of definition. Last but not least, it turns out that the type of definition most consistently affected the consultation of examples by the US, since in all dictionaries with contextual definitions examples were referred to much less frequently than in those with analytical ones. 18 It is therefore possible to conclude that while contextual definitions were in general much less conducive to the localization of verb syntax in examples than analytical ones, functional codes placed inside the entry also acted as a disincentive to the US' reference to examples, and even the extra column with formal codes discouraged the subjects from underlining examples which followed analytical definitions. Clearly, then, whereas the effect of the type of definition on the dependent variable was the most pronounced in both samples, that of the place of codes proved to be unique to one microstructure and one group of subjects.

3.2.4. Codes The present section verifies the hypotheses about the localization of verb syntax in codes. For each sample, the hypothesis that codes incorporated into the entry were referred to more often than those in the extra column is tested first, followed by the hypothesis which predicts heavier reliance on formal than functional codes. The role of the type of definition is examined last. Below are given data which make it possible to tackle the issues with respect to the HSS.

18

The large observed values of Ζ imply that the influence exerted by this independent variable was significant not only at p < 0 5 , but also at p2

EXAMPLES H0:P1=P2;H,:P1#>2 P2

Ζ test

CFO

64,8 CPI 62,7

0,505

S

PI CFO

P2

Ζ test

53,9 CPI

55,5 -0,388

S

CFUN

65,8 CPI 62,7

0,719

CFUN

56,5 CPI

55,5 -0,231

CFO

73,7 CPI 38,1

9,072

-

CFO

67,7 CPI

89,5 -6,717

+

CFUN

66,1 CPI 38,1

7,116

-

CFUN

74,9 CPI

89,5 -4,824

+

The foregoing comparisons reveal statistically significant differences only in the sample of the US. For one thing, the incorporation of pattern illustrations into entries with contextual definitions made the US pay considerably less attention to examples. For another, the subjects referred to pattern illustrations much more frequently than to the two other sources of verb syntax available in CFO and CFUN. By contrast, the HSS' heavy reliance on examples hardly changed and pattern illustrations were no more helpful to the subjects than contextual definitions plus either formal or functional codes. The conclusions following from the last two sections clearly show how the presence of pattern illustrations in entries altered the way the subjects located syntactic information on

25

26

The results of the adaptation of the data in these two dictionaries are given in table A.3.8 in the appendix. Naturally, under the circumstances, separate comparisons of the subjects' consultation of pattern illustrations in CPI and either codes or definitions in the other dictionaries are out of the question. In both cases the basis for the comparisons would be provided by the same data and an analogy would be sought between the frequency of the subjects' recourse to only one and the same source in CPI and each of the two sources in CFO and CFUN, which in all probability would lead to largely overestimated values of the test statistic. Besides, as shown in section 3.2.1, reference to codes in CPI was negligible, which warrants the comparisons presented in the table.

154 verbs. It transpires that the statistically significant effects it produced were the most farreaching in the more advanced sample, where a distinct and pronounced shift of focus from examples to pattern illustrations has been identified. Besides, pattern illustrations themselves were consulted there much more frequently than any codes in entries with analytical definitions, and even than codes and contextual definitions taken together in the others. The HSS did not appreciate pattern illustrations to the same extent. Playing a prominent role only in the vicinity of analytical definitions, pattern illustrations also detracted the attention of those dictionary users from examples, but did not prove to be substantially more useful to them than functional codes. The HSS' poorer command of the language might lead one to expect a greater appreciation of this source of syntactic information. 27 This closes the presentation of main findings from the research. The conclusions drawn in the preceding sections reveal a wealth of detail not only on where in entries syntactic information was found, but also on the effects of the independent and moderator variables on the frequency with which the sources of such information were referred to. Some predictions made in this regard were confirmed, others were confounded, the fulfillment of still others turned out to be conditioned by specific features of the microstructure. Moreover, the study disclosed new relations, at times intriguing or startling, about which no hypotheses had been formulated. While some attempts at generalization have already been made in the course of the discussion, it is only in section 3.4 that an endeavor is made to systematically build up a broader picture by means of the ANOVA. Nonetheless, due attention must still be paid to the other variables which might have affected the localization of verb syntax in the dictionaries. It is mainly the study of their significance that the next section is devoted to.

3.3.

Ancillary findings - a sidelight

3.3.1. Prefatory remarks The independent variables whose significance is investigated in what follows are in stark contrast to those already discussed in that they are extrinsic to the verb entry. First, attention is paid to the effect exerted by the subjects' proficiency, not on the relations between the dependent and the independent variables, but directly on the former. The status of the level of proficiency as an independent variable rather than as a moderating one is thus explored. Besides, the influence of gender on the localization of verb syntax in entries and practical consequences of familiarity with the information on symbols incorporated into verb codes are submitted to scrutiny. In this way, the correspondence between the selected pieces of information from the questionnaire and the actual decisions the subjects made when faced with verb entries is established. Still, as the effects of these independent

27

It is interesting to note that apart from two differences in section 3.2.5.1, all the remaining ones found statistically significant in that section and in the present one were significant even at p