Anna Dziemianko. User-friendliness of Verb Syntax in Pedagogical Dictionaries of English

Abstract

To be user-friendly, monolingual and bilingual dictionaries for foreign users must be both easy to use and easy to read. They are designed to help prospective users both encode and decode, and to facilitate the comprehension of some vocabulary items or particular grammatical constructions. However, it often happens in practice that dictionaries are not used fully because some users are not aware of the richness of their contents. In carrying out the redesign of their dictionaries, lexicographers have been helped greatly by the views, needs, and preferences of a wide range of language users, many of them, of course, from schools and universities as well as general language learners. Further adaptations always follow, based on the experience of using a new dictionary and for this purpose feedback is always of great importance. In the process of establishing a user-friendly dictionary, the changes, though extensive, remain modest but in the much longer term, more complex changes take place to incorporate revisions and give them new clarity and coherence across the many and expanding contexts in which they are used. Whether this redesign actually helps users is the subject of much research. Both traditional and electronic dictionaries have now included a large number of tools in the definition, such as IPA pronunciation, examples and syntactic information, often presented in the shape of codes which will enable users not only to understand a particular structure, but to be able to reuse it.