Noun and Verb Codes in Pedagogical Dictionaries of English: User-friendliness Revisited (original) (raw)

The aim of the present paper is to assess the user-friendliness of noun and verb coding systems in pedagogical dictionaries of English, measured by the frequency with which relevant information properly used in a productive task is located in codes. The influence of the following independent variables on the user-friendliness of codes is studied: the degree of syntactic congruity between Polish lexical items and English headwords, the form of codes, the grammatical category of headwords and the level of dictionary users' proficiency in English. To investigate the influence of the form of codes on their user-friendliness, codes in noun and verb entries were divided into mainstream-referring to formal categories, transparent and prevalent in pedagogical dictionaries, and alternative-which, used very sparingly in today's dictionaries, include reference to sentence functions-verbs-or many quite opaque symbols-