Multi-category Words of Verb-Noun in Chinese Learners Mobile App Dictionary and Their Applications for Dictionary Compilation

Abstract

One of the most important and heated topics in modern Chinese studies is the classification of word types. Among all word types, the word of multi-categories is a special and difficult case, especially multi-category words of verb-noun (VNs) for students learning Chinese as the second language. To help them learn this kind of word, several teaching methods and textbook compilation methods have been proposed, with only a few studies focusing on dictionary compilation. However, as a significant tool for second language learning, the dictionary plays an important role in helping learners improve their productive ability in using multi-category words. This paper examined the definitions of the multi-category word of verb-noun by different scholars and chose Yus criteria from the need of learning Chinese as the second language. Common colligations and collocations of five VNs in native Chinese were extracted from two corpora and Online Chinese Collocation Assistant tool. Then, takingas an example, this paper analyzed the differences in its use by native Chinese and Chinese learners with a particular focus on its colligations and collocations. The results reveal that it was overused by Chinese learners as a verb, while underused as a noun. There was an imbalance between the use of the part of speech as verb and noun. Finally, this study proposed a better way to represent in a learning dictionary to help Chinese learners use this word.