55.3 (2007): 235260 ©
DIRK SIEPMANN
The production of learners’ dictionaries raises a number of specific prob
lems regarding the treatment of collocations and examples. It has been claimed,
among other things, that example sentences should not be based exclusively on col
locations. The present article argues that a clear distinction must be drawn between
collocations and examples, and that, under certain conditions, collocations must also
be exemplified. It discusses various approaches to the microstructural arrangement
of collocations and establishes guiding principles for the choice and presentation of
examples.
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In recent years great strides have been made in linguistic description – a devel
opment that was partly sparked by lexicographic projects (COBUILD, Herbst
et. al.: 2004). With unprecedented riches of data
and powerful enquiry tools at their fingertips, lexicographers have produced
dictionaries which give a highly accurate and very detailed picture of language in
use. Ample testimony to this can be found in the five “big” learners’ dictionaries
and in many bilingual works of reference. One area that has received particularly
close attention is collocation. Thus, the
has succeeded in recording 150,000 collocations of 9,000 com
mon nouns, verbs and adjectives.
That said, there is still room for improvement. One type of shortcoming,
which I have enlarged on elsewhere (Siepmann 2005b; Siepmann 2006; Siep
mann, forthcoming), is linguistic: particular types of collocations have so far
been given short shrift or are difficult to access. Another type of shortcoming is
pedagogic: the major monolingual learners’ dictionaries are reference tools for
occasional consultation, but they cannot be used for serious vocabulary expan
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