Pragmatic Considerations for an English-Japanese Dictionary

要旨

For language pairs that do not share the same cultural traditions, the notion of one-to-one equivalence is likely to become less and less reliable. In the case of English and Japanese, the cultural conventions that govern communication differ to such an extent that English learners would be led into error if they only sought semantic equivalents because Japanese do not use the same expressions as we do to communicate the same message in similar situations. In this paper I try to show how, as equivalence becomes less and less reliable at a discourse level, the inclusion of pragmatic information becomes more and more important to the active dictionary's entry. I have also considered possible methods of presenting pragmatic information and constructed a sample entry to illustrate what I consider to be the optimum presentation

主題