Towards an Integrated Collocation Dictionary Plus for advanced EFL Learners: Greater Availability and Equal Accessibility

lu, huaguo ; wei, xiangqing;

Collocation dictionaries are primarily encoding in terms of both data categories (i.e. combination-oriented and selection-oriented information) and data presentation (i.e. onomasiological arrangement). However, the two-dimensional encoding nature of collocation dictionaries receives insufficient attention in lexicographical practice, thus limiting dictionaries’ capability to meet users’ selection-oriented information needs further. Our comparison involves four fairly recent collocation dictionaries and shows that there is a tendency to arrange more combinations in an increasingly semantically-oriented fashion at the micro-structural level. This tendency opens up a possibility of creating a collocation dictionary plus, that is, a collocation dictionary integrated with opaque idioms, single words and collocational errors.