From dictionary to phrasebook

Abstract

Language is characterized by a large number of conventionalized phrases which, unlike idioms, 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.

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