| Abstract |
The importance of lexical collocations is nowadays undeniable, especially from a SLA perspective. Besides grammar, learners of a second language also need to access information concerning the lexical environment of words. The knowledge of the restrictions on lexical combinability is part of a L2 competence and should be successfully master by learners.
Possibly, the most important source of information on lexis is the dictionary, thus it should also be (or become) a reference tool for the retrieval of collocations. In particular, bilingual dictionaries seem to be favoured by learners; this makes it increasingly more important for them to represent the combinatorial rules that organise lexis on the syntagmatic axis.
This study aims at investigating the presence and the treatment of some adjectival collocations in three bilingual dictionaries English-Italian. Six adjectives related to the semantic area of emotions are singled out and their nominal, adverbial and verbal collocates looked up in both sections of the dictionaries. The data are then compared to those available from a dictionary of English collocations and from the British National Corpus. From a quantitative point of view, the study highlights an unsatisfactory presence of adjectival collocations, especially when the collocate is an adverb. The very few collocations found in the dictionaries are often closer to free combinations, therefore doubtfully useful to dictionary users. The collocations are not systematically organised and can be found interchangeably under either the base or the collocator, thus creating a feeling of confusion that leads to poor user-friendliness. On the whole, from the analysis of the data, it emerges that the issue of collocation should be taken into greater account from bilingual lexicography. |
| BibTex |
@InProceedings{ELX10-114,
author = {Barbara Berti},
title = {The Treatment of Lexical Collocations of Six Adjectives Related to Feelings in A Sample of Bilingual Dictionaries English-Italian},
pages = {1161-1170},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 14th EURALEX International Congress},
year = {2010},
month = {jul},
date = {6-10},
address = {Leeuwarden/Ljouwert, The Netherlands},
editor = {Anne Dykstra and Tanneke Schoonheim},
publisher = {Fryske Akademy},
isbn = {978-90-6273-850-3},
} |
