A Study on Pragmatic Information in Chinese-English Dictionaries

The study aims to investigate the pragmatic information in Chinese-English dictionaries. A general survey was made to examine the status quo of the pragmatic information in the existing Chinese-English dictionaries. It was found that all largeand medium-sized dictionaries under investigation provided some pragmatic information. They generally used a label to mark the style, register and subject field of the lemma and a note to show its culture and usage. The most widely used labels were subject field labels. Except a pocket dictionary, all the other eight dictionaries employed them. Then style labels were used. However, these dictionaries only provided the pragmatic information about the Chinese headword but not the English equivalent. The author argues that since the target users of these dictionaries are Chinese EFL learners, they should state clearly the pragmatic differences between the headword in the source language and the equivalent in the target language. Moreover, the cultural notes provided should be focused on the English equivalents instead.