Het Verklarend Handwoordenboek als Leermiddel Voor Gevorderden

Abstract

Students of economics at the University of Antwerp, UFSIA (Belgium) have been asked about the usefulness of grammatical information in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (DCE) and the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English (ALD). The dictionaries have been used in English lessons as an alternative and active way of brushing up grammatical knowledge, in order to develop the habit of consulting these reference works. The grammatical coding system in DCE is more comprehensive than in ALD. With a few exceptions most of the symbols are learnable. DCE presupposes some grammatical knowledge on the part of the user of the dictionary. Some inconsistencies with A Grammar of Contemporary English by R. Quirk, the linguistic adviser of DCE, are pointed out: the treatment of - transitivity - the copula - infinitive constructions as object of a verb In the future the coding of grammatical information will have to be improved. With a number of translating dictionaries from foreign languages into Dutch to appear, containing grammatical data similar to ALD and DCE, the need for greater uniformity of presentation and especially of the principles of grammatical coding is urgent.