The treatment of argument structure constructions in online English learners' dictionaries: The case of V N ADJ ASCs

Abstract

Despite their diversity and complexity in structure and meaning, little research has been conducted into the systematic presentation of argument structure constructions (ASCs) in English learners' dictionaries (ELDs). To fill in the gap, this paper focused on the treatment of V N ADJ ASCs in the "Big Five" online ELDs against usage data. First a list of 40 target verbs was obtained using two measures of contingency (i.e., faithfulness and collostruction strength) through collostructional analysis of V N ADJ ASCs in the British National Corpus, and then the related ASCs regarding their macro- and micro-structural presentation in selected dictionaries were examined. It was found that most ELDs attach importance to ASCs, notably LDOCE, which assigns many of them the status of phrases. Nevertheless, the treatment of ASCs in current ELDs is inadequate. First, the inclusion of ASCs in most ELDs is far from sufficient. Second, in some cases, there is a mismatch between a valency pattern illustration and an illustrative example. Last but not least, most ELDs are not consistent with respect to their policy of listing and encoding ASCs, and assigning them the status of phrases. We proposed, in the framework of the usage-based construction grammar, some suggestions for optimizing the treatment of ASCs.