Syntactic Information in Monolingual Dictionaries

One of the most difficult things for the lexicographer to convey concerns the complex interdependencies between a verb and its complement-taking properties. Although this information forms an essential part of verb grammar, existing dictionaries prove inadequate in their attempt to provide the syntactic frame a verb can enter and the possible variations in the expression of its arguments. On the basis of these observations we have wanted to verify to what extent a monolingual dictionary, as the Oxford Learner's Dictionary of Current English, succeeds in adequately dealing with some syntactic phenomena of special importance. We began by examining some verbal classes which exemplify the locative/transposed constructions, the dative constructions and those which record regular interactions of form and/or meaning between transitive and intransitive verbal uses. We then examined how some entries, representing these classes, have been dealt with in the dictionary. Our work ends with a proposal as to a new model of syntactic representation along the lines of the lexicon-grammar approach.