词典释义研究的沿革与发展趋向【荐】.pdfVIP

Guangzhou, China Modern Foreign Languages (Quarterly) Vol.23, No.4, October 2000: 371-382 Evolution and Trends of the Researches on Lexicographical Definitions Zhang Yihua Huang Qunying Lexicographical definitions consist in the decomposition and representation of lexical meanings. As language is a complex system, the expression and understand ing of a word meaning involves many different relations of the word to its users and to the external world. So the representation of the meaning is characterized by a multidimensional aspect. How should these relations be represented? And how should the multidimensional aspect of meanings be demonstrated? Western linguists and lexicographers have conducted many scientific investigations about this. The studies show that the single-level conceptual definitions based on “sufficient and necessary conditions” have evident deficiency in the representation of meanings. The Semantic Decomposition Theory regards the lexical units as the concepts that can be decomposed into simple or atomic ideas. The simple ideas can be expressed by semantic markers or distinguishers, controlled by various selectional constraints. A proposal has been put forward, by the Generative Grammar, that the purpose of linguistic researches is to explain and describe the linguistic intuition of native speakers, and that not only the deep structure, but also the transformational component and the phonological component govern the semantic interpretation. Jackendoff’s Conceptual Structure has improved the methods of decomposition by means of the formalization of th