Abstract
AbstractLearners’ thesauri do not simply offer an inventory of semantically related lexical items but explicate their nuances and furnish users with rich syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information. Adopting the theoretical framework of valency, this study examines the distinctive features of two English learners’ thesauri, the Oxford Learner’s Thesaurus: A Dictionary of Synonyms (OLT) and the Longman Language Activator (LLA). Furthermore, the study, supported by learner corpus evidence, empirically assesses the usefulness of OLT and LLA in Chinese learners’ writing. The results demonstrate that learners’ thesauri can generally meet the practical needs of users in writing through providing a range of synonyms and syntactic patterns, including abundant information on semantic collocations, and offering rich pragmatic information regarding registers and emotive variables. The results also show some defects in OLT and LLA, such as their failure to present specific syntactic patterns, including those frequently used in Chinese learners’ compositions. It is then suggested that the compilation of learners’ thesauri draw upon the ways in which lexical information is presented in the English Valency Dictionary, and that learner corpora and native speaker corpora be combined to improve their usefulness.
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