Abstract
AbstractThis paper considers the fact that many verbal Chinese idioms are defined in recent Chinese-English dictionaries with misleading parts of speech — they are generally described only as being nouns. This situation originates in the 1978 Hàn-Yīng cídiǎn 汉英词典 of Wú Jǐngróng 吴景荣, whose definitions have exerted overwhelming influence on the field since then. We document Wú's principal sources and the viewpoints that motivated him, including the heavy political pressure to which his lexicographic team were subjected in the late Cultural Revolution. In addition, we consider Wú's anomalous misreading of the purpose of the influential Giles and Mathews dictionaries, which had been to document the many senses of each character with multi-character words, rather than to document multi-character words per se.
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