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Dorota Chłopek, Emil Tokarz
ATH, Bielsko-Biała
Poljska
INTERNET ENGLISH MONOLINGUAL LEXICONS AND MEANING
CONSTRUCTION
The paper is addressed at learners of English as a foreign language. The objective of the paper
is to illustrate how Internet monolingual dictionaries can trigger meaning construction. We
have focused upon English lexicons since they have a substantial representation on the
Internet, together with abundant context with the lexical items that are being looked up, such
as the dictionaries that are called concordances. We do not analyse the structure of Internet
lexicons in detail. Our interest falls upon categorisation. Therefore we present a lexical item
that is likely to by unknown by numerous learners of English as a foreign language – the verb
procrastinate. We demonstrate the particular Internet dictionaries and comment on how they
may trigger construing the meaning of a new lexical item.
Construing the meaning involves psychological processes that need adequate stimuli, such as
a definition supported with a huge variety of context with the given word since meaning is
usage based. In the first section of our paper, we point at the processes taking place in
meaning construction, such as the ability of humans to think through image schemas,
Idealized Cognitive Models, to construe meaning through mapping between domains and
through conceptual blending. They are supported with the context available through the
interstructure and the mesostructure of the Internet dictionaries. Exhaustive resources with
patterns of text with the particular lexical item, like the language corpora, or thesauri with
synonyms or related words, also with antonyms, help the conceptualiser understand the given
lexical item and use it properly. Moreover, the psychological processes involved in meaning
construction, when repeated many times with a variety of stimuli, such as numerous examples
of usage, may contribute to retaining the given lexical item and to using it correctly by a
learner, which is indispensable in acquiring a foreign language.