Collocations and Distinction of Senses in Printed Monolingual Learners’ Dictionaries: Theory and Pra

Abstract

The paper discusses meaning presentation strategies in two general monolingual English learners’ explanatory dictionaries against the background of the concept of meaning advocated in metalexicography. The analysis of theoretical views has revealed that the postulated primacy of context, and, more narrowly, of collocations, in defining meanings, backed by arguments from both linguistics and beyond, had an impact on processing word meanings, in terms of the resulting structure of dictionary entries. In the analysis of entries the texts of definitions have been juxtaposed to collocations given in the same entries in two editions of Longman and COBUILD dictionaries. Later editions not only provide considerably more collocations in both examples and definitions, but also more often split senses into subsenses, the decisive factor for splitting being different collocates of the head word, to the extent that definitions of some senses or subsenses are either identical or very similar. Meaning is seen as a fuzzy category with blurred and overlapping edges both in theory and in lexicographic practice.