Abstract
The treatment of multiword expressions (MWEs) in dictionaries has not received much attention in metalexicography, although the significant role of phraseology has been stressed since the advent of corpus linguistics. The paper aims to analyse the lexicographic representation of semantically related MWEs, containing body part names. The study focuses on access routes to these MWEs in the 'Big Five' monolingual English learners' dictionaries online (MELDs). It investigates the presence and positions of hyperlinked MWEs on the page of the body part headword in order to find out if they depend on a given MWE or are dictionary-specific. Double or multiple hyperlinks to the same MWE are frequently found within a single body part entry, and the variety of access routes is evaluated with a view to offering a more homogeneous presentation of hyperlinked related MWEs.
Highlights
Already in the first half of the 20th century, the authors of the first English pedagogical dictionaries, Harold Palmer and A.S
3.1 Defined or hyperlinked The results of the study demonstrate that in four out of five dictionaries under scrutiny, body part multiword expressions (MWEs) are hyperlinked in the overwhelming majority of cases rather than defined in the entry for the body part name
The proportions of hyperlinked MWEs are equal or close to equal in Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary (CALD), COBUILD, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) and Macmillan English Dictionary Online (MEDO): 95%, 92%, 95% and 92% respectively
Summary
Already in the first half of the 20th century, the authors of the first English pedagogical dictionaries, Harold Palmer and A.S. One reason behind neglecting this issue in metalexicography is lack of consensus concerning MWEs terminology While proposing her own typology of fixed expressions and idioms, Moon (1998: 19-20) observes that there is no generally agreed set of categories in the literature subsumed under MWEs, and clear classifications are impossible. Collocations, idioms, phrases, similes, metaphors and sayings overlap, and it is often hard to assign a MWE to a single category Another reason is 'the privileged status that the (orthographic) word has traditionally enjoyed in lexicography' (Lew 2012: 349). This is not surprising due to the variable lexical and structural fixedness of MWEs as shown by corpus-based research The fact that their search strings will vary from the canonical form included in the dictionary does not constitute a problem any longer owing to the partial matching functionality in many online dictionaries
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