英语论文网

Chapter one Introduction

1.1 Rationale of the Study
The phenomenon that every word has one and only one meaning in naturallanguages found in the world could never have happened (Lyons, 1995, p. 26). Dueto the economical efficiency of human languages, the ability of one single linguisticform to covey more than one meaning has been an essential nature in humanlanguages. Thus, polysemy becomes a thorny issue with a venerable history both inlinguistics and in lexicography.The more common a word is, the more possible it is to have sets of meanings.Words which compose the bulk of most texts are those with very high frequency use.That is to say, it is those polysemous words that make up the core vocabulary oflanguage. According to Atkins & Rundell (2008, p. 266), the major part of job forlexicographers relates to giving an accurate description to these frequent andpolysemous lexemes. However, describing the meanings of polysemous words is alsoone of the most difficult problems torturing practicing lexicographers at the sametime. Just as Zgusta (1971, p. 66) maintains: “if the lexicographer will do well toreckon always with polysemy, this will cause him to undertake very deep analyses ofthe word’s meaning”.Specifically speaking, the importance of accurate depiction of senses indictionaries can be illustrated through two aspects. Firstly, it is known well that threefactors should be taken into consideration in the process of dictionary design:pre-lexicography, macrostructure of evidence and microstructure.
……………

1.2 Objectives of the Study
Based on the previous fruitful studies, this study mainly puts an emphasis on therepresentation of two opposite meanings of contronyms in English learner’sdictionaries. The author maintains that whether one novel meaning of a lexeme canget access to a dictionary largely depends on the extent to which the sense isaccepted and conventionalized in the language community. In other words, for alarge part, it is the frequency of use that determines the presentation of meanings indictionaries. In view of this, the presentation of the two opposite senses ofcontronyms in dictionaries should be studied within the theoretical basis ofUsage-Based Theory to investigate how language is systematically grounded inlanguage use. With the advent of corpus linguistics, the emergence of large corporaprovides a solid and reliable basis for the study of the presentation of the languageknowledge in dictionaries.
…………

Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Introduction
Jack Herring created the term contronym, which was defined as a word with twocontradictory senses (Lederer, 1978, p. 27). Taking scan for an example, it can notonly refer to looking at every part of something carefully but also can refer tolooking over something hastily. Meanwhile, contronymy has often been described asthe phenomenon of meanings opposition within one word. In view of this,contronymy is also regarded as a sub-category of polysemy. Up to now, manyremarkable achievements have been attained by a large number of scholars who havestudied both polysemy and contronymy from different perspectives.
…………

2.2 Previous Studies on Polysemy
According to Cuckens & Zawada (2001, p. x), polysemy ori本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。