User-friendliness of verb syntax in pedagogical dictionaries of English

Book excerpt: The study examines the user-friendliness of sources of verb syntax in monolingual English learners' dictionaries. It is both theoretical and empirical in nature. The theoretical part is based on an analysis of consecutive editions of major pedagogical dictionaries of English in paper form. The empirical part relies on statistical analyses of numerical data yielded by comprehensive research, which was based, in the main, on the experimental method. In the experiment, the user-friendliness of sources of verb syntax in learners' dictionaries was measured by the frequency with which the properly identified and useful syntactic information was located in particular entry components. The sources of syntactic information in the entries compiled especially for the purpose of the experiment were the ones which featured in the major pedagogical dictionaries most recent at the time of the study. 606 subjects, divided into two groups of different proficiency in English, underlined in the manipulated entries the syntactic information which they considered helpful in answering multiple choice questions. The most user-friendly solutions, both coded and uncoded ones, are recommended in the final part of the book.