A Comparative Analysis of Definitions of Phrasal Verbs in Monolingual General-purpose Dictionaries for Native Speakers of American and British English

By November 17, 2016,
Page 1385-1392
Author Magdalena Perdek
Title A Comparative Analysis of Definitions of Phrasal Verbs in Monolingual General-purpose Dictionaries for Native Speakers of American and British English
Abstract This paper is an attempt to analyze the definitions of phrasal verbs in monolingual general purpose dictionaries for native speakers of English. Four dictionaries from Great Britain and four from the USA published in the last decade provide material for the study which includes a total of 100 phrasal verbs. Bearing in mind the specific semantic load of phrasal verbs, their limitation as to the choice of objects as well as the fact that they are commonly used, this study aims at finding whether there exist significant differences in describing phrasal verbs on both sides of the Atlantic. Three aspects are analyzed in particular: word choice with emphasis on the occurrence of difficult, very formal and rarely used words; precision in rendering the meaning, and inclusion of objects typical of a given sense of a phrasal verb. The analysis reveals that there are certain areas of correlation but also points of differences, not only between the two lexicographic traditions but within each of them separately.
Session 8. Phraseology and Collocation
Keywords
BibTex 
@InProceedings{ELX08-142,
	   author = {Magdalena Perdek},
	   title = {A Comparative Analysis of Definitions of Phrasal Verbs in Monolingual General-purpose Dictionaries for Native Speakers of American and British English},
	   pages = {1385-1392},
	   booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th EURALEX International Congress},
	   year = {2008},
	   month = {jul},
	   date = {15-19},
	   address = {Barcelona, Spain},
	   editor = {Elisenda Bernal, Janet DeCesaris},
	   publisher = {Institut Universitari de Linguistica Aplicada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra},
	   isbn = {978-84-96742-67-3},
	}
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