From dictionary to phrasebook
Year: 2008
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Language is characterized by a large number of conventionalized phrases which, unlikeidioms, are largely regular, both semantically and syntactically. Biber et al. (1999) call
these phrases lexical bundles and highlight the key role they play both in spoken and
written discourse. In spite of their high frequency, these types of phrase have not yet
received the place they deserve in dictionaries. In this article, we describe how they are
integrated into monolingual learners' dictionaries of English and English-French bilingual
dictionaries. The description shows that the presentation of these phrases is largely based
on intuition and fails to reflect authentic usage as attested by corpus investigation. We
make a plea for a more rigorous-corpus-based-integration of these phrases and illustrate
our approach with a fully corpus-based section devoted to English for Academic Purposes
(EAP), functions that has been integrated as a middle section in the new edition of the
Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners.
Authors: Sylviane Granger, Magali Paquot
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1612177656