A Study on Pragmatic Information in Chinese-English Dictionaries

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.210803.004How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Chinese-English dictionary, Pragmatic information, Pragmatics, Bilingual dictionary, Lexicography, English learning and teaching

Abstract

The study aims to investigate the pragmatic information in Chinese-English dictionaries. A general survey was made to examine the status quo of the pragmatic information in the existing Chinese-English dictionaries. It was found that all large- and medium-sized dictionaries under investigation provided some pragmatic information. They generally used a label to mark the style, register and subject field of the lemma and a note to show its culture and usage. The most widely used labels were subject field labels. Except a pocket dictionary, all the other eight dictionaries employed them. Then style labels were used. However, these dictionaries only provided the pragmatic information about the Chinese headword but not the English equivalent. The author argues that since the target users of these dictionaries are Chinese EFL learners, they should state clearly the pragmatic differences between the headword in the source language and the equivalent in the target language. Moreover, the cultural notes provided should be focused on the English equivalents instead.

Copyright

© 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Lixin Xia
AU  - Yun Xia
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/08/04
TI  - A Study on Pragmatic Information in Chinese-English Dictionaries
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Diversified Education and Social Development (DESD 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 17
EP  - 21
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210803.004
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.210803.004
ID  - Xia2021
ER  -