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Macmillan English Dictionary For Advanced Learners
''Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners'', also known as ''MEDAL'', is an advanced learner's dictionary published from 2002 until 2023 by Macmillan Education. It shares most of the features of this type of dictionary: it provides definitions in simple language, using a controlled defining vocabulary; most words have example sentences to illustrate how they are typically used; and information is given about how words combine grammatically or in collocations. ''MEDAL'' also introduced a number of innovations. These include: * "collocation boxes" giving lists of high-frequency collocates, identified using Sketch Engine software * word frequency information, with the most frequent 7500 English words shown in red and categorised in three frequency bands, based on the idea, derived from Zipf's law, that a relatively small number of high-frequency words account for a high percentage of most texts * "metaphor boxes", showing how the vocabulary used for expressing common c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Advanced Learner's Dictionary
The advanced learner's dictionary is the most common type of monolingual learner's dictionary, that is, a dictionary written in one language only, for someone who is learning a foreign language. It differs from a bilingual or translation dictionary, a standard dictionary written for native speakers, or a children's dictionary. Its definitions are usually built on a restricted defining vocabulary. "Advanced" usually refers learners with a proficiency level of B2 or above according to the Common European Framework. Basic learner's dictionaries also exist. Although these advanced dictionaries have been produced for learners of several languages (including Chinese, Dutch, German, and Spanish), the majority are written for learners of English. Printed The best-known advanced learner's dictionaries are: *'' Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary'', first published in 1948. *'' Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English'', first published in 1978. *'' Collins Cobuild English Dict ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Macmillan Education
Macmillan Education is a publishing imprint and business which has been owned by various divisions and companies of the Macmillan publishing group and, more recently, the Springer Nature Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group is a German-British academic publishing company created by the May 2015 merger of Springer Science+Business Media and Holtzbrinck Publishing Group's Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macm ... group which is jointly owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and BC Partners. The company that runs the imprint is based in London and operates in over 120 countries worldwide. As of 2023, Macmillan Education is focused mainly on materials and services for language learning (mostly English) and for teaching international curricula in schools worldwide. History Macmillan Education was created as an imprint and division of the broader Macmillan publishing business in the UK in the early 1970s. In 1994 it became legally framed within Macmillan Edu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Defining Vocabulary
A defining vocabulary is a list of words used by lexicographers to write dictionary definitions. The underlying principle goes back to Samuel Johnson's notion that words should be defined using 'terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained', and a defining vocabulary provides the lexicographer with a restricted list of high-frequency words which can be used for producing simple definitions of any word in the dictionary. Defining vocabularies are especially common in English monolingual learner's dictionaries. The first such dictionary to use a defining vocabulary was the ''New Method English Dictionary'' by Michael West and James Endicott (published in 1935), a small dictionary written using a defining vocabulary of just 1,490 words. When the ''Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English'' was first published in 1978, its most striking feature was its use of a 2,000-word defining vocabulary based on Michael West's General Service List, and since then defining vocabulari ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Collocation
In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an idiom, where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated. There are about seven main types of collocations: adjective + noun, noun + noun (such as collective nouns), noun + verb, verb + noun, adverb + adjective, verbs + prepositional phrase ( phrasal verbs), and verb + adverb. Collocation extraction is a computational technique that finds collocations in a document or corpus, using various computational linguistics elements resembling data mining. Expanded definition Collocations are partly or fully fixed expressions that become established through repeated context-dependent use. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sketch Engine
Sketch Engine is a corpus manager and text analysis software developed by Lexical Computing since 2003. Its purpose is to enable people studying language behaviour (lexicographers, researchers in corpus linguistics, translators or language learners) to search large text collections according to complex and linguistically motivated queries. Sketch Engine gained its name after one of the key features, word sketches: one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour. Currently, it supports and provides corpora in over 90 languages. History of development Sketch Engine is a product of Lexical Computing, a company founded in 2003 by the lexicographer and research scientist Adam Kilgarriff. He started a collaboration with Pavel Rychlý, a computer scientist working at the Natural Language Processing Centre, Masaryk University, and the developer of Manatee and Bonito (two major parts of the software suite). Kilgarriff also introduced th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zipf's Law
Zipf's law (; ) is an empirical law stating that when a list of measured values is sorted in decreasing order, the value of the -th entry is often approximately inversely proportional to . The best known instance of Zipf's law applies to the frequency table of words in a text or corpus of natural language: \ \mathsf\ \propto\ \frac ~. It is usually found that the most common word occurs approximately twice as often as the next common one, three times as often as the third most common, and so on. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word "''the''" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's law, the second-place word "''of''" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "''and''" (28,852). It is often used in the following form, called Zipf-Mandelbrot law: \ \mathsf\ \propto\ \frac\ where \ a\ a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Lakoff
George Philip Lakoff ( ; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena. The conceptual metaphor thesis, introduced in his and Mark Johnson's 1980 book '' Metaphors We Live By'' has found applications in a number of academic disciplines. Applying it to politics, literature, philosophy and mathematics has led Lakoff into territory normally considered basic to political science. In his 1996 book '' Moral Politics'', Lakoff described conservative voters as being influenced by the " strict father model" as a central metaphor for such a complex phenomenon as the state, and liberal/ progressive voters as being influenced by the " nurturant parent model" as the folk psychological metaphor for this complex phenomenon. According to him, an individual's experience and attitude towards sociopolitical issues is influenced by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conceptual Metaphor
In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "the price of peace is ''rising''") or the understanding of time in terms of money (e.g. "I ''spent'' time at work today"). A conceptual domain can be any mental organization of human experience. The regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, often perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain. This theory gained wide attention in the 1990s and early 2000s, although some researchers question its empirical accuracy. The conceptual metaphor theory proposed by George Lakoff and his colleagues arose from linguistics, but became of interest to cognitive scientists due to its claims about the mind, the brain and their connections to the b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louvain-la-Neuve
Louvain-la-Neuve (; French for "New Leuven"; ) is a planned town in the municipality of Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve, Wallonia, Belgium, situated 30 km southeast of Brussels, in the province of Walloon Brabant. The town was built to house the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) which owns the entire territory of the town; following the linguistic quarrels that took place in Belgium during the 1960s, and Flemish claims of discrimination at the Catholic University of Leuven, the institution was split into the Dutch language Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), which remained in Leuven, and the Université catholique de Louvain. To a great extent, it still lives following the rhythms of the university that is its raison d'être. However, with the construction of ''L'Esplanade'' shopping complex, the '' Aula Magna'' exhibition centre and auditorium, a large cinema complex, and five museums, it is beginning to grow beyond its academic roots. History Language ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Belgium
Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to the south, and the North Sea to the west. Belgium covers an area of and has a population of more than 11.8 million; its population density of ranks List of countries and dependencies by population density, 22nd in the world and Area and population of European countries, sixth in Europe. The capital and Metropolitan areas in Belgium, largest metropolitan region is City of Brussels, Brussels; other major cities are Antwerp, Ghent, Charleroi, Liège, Bruges, Namur, and Leuven. Belgium is a parliamentary system, parliamentary constitutional monarchy with a complex Federation, federal system structured on regional and linguistic grounds. The country is divided into three highly autonomous Communities, regions and language areas o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sylviane Granger
Sylviane Granger (born 5 July 1951) is a Belgian linguist and emeritus professor of the University of Louvain (UCLouvain). She is the founder of the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (CECL) and is best known for her pioneering work in the field of Learner Corpus Research. She has mainly published in the areas of corpus linguistics, learner language, contrastive linguistics, translation studies and lexicography. Career Sylviane Granger completed her entire career at UCLouvain. After studying English and Dutch philology, she started as a research fellow at the FNRS in 1972. She later took on a teaching assistant position in English language and linguistics, and in 1981 she obtained her PhD under the supervision of Jacques Van Roey. Her PhD dissertation was about the use of ''be + past participle'' in spoken English with a special focus on the passive. She then continued her career as a professor in English language and linguistics. In 1991, she founded the Centre for Engli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electronic Dictionary
An electronic dictionary is a dictionary whose data exists in digital form and can be accessed through a number of different media. Electronic dictionaries can be found in several forms, including software installed on tablet or desktop computers, mobile apps, web applications, and as a built-in function of E-readers. They may be free or require payment. Information Most of the early electronic dictionaries were, in effect, print dictionaries made available in digital form: the content was identical, but the electronic editions provided users with more powerful search functions. But soon the opportunities offered by digital media began to be exploited. Two advantages are that limitations of space (and the need to optimize its use) become less pressing, so additional content can be provided; and the possibility arises of including multimedia content, such as audio pronunciations and video clips. Electronic dictionary databases, especially those included with software dictiona ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
