Criteria for Selecting Trisyllabic Words as Headwords in the Chinese-French Dictionary

Abstract

In the 2015 concluding report An Approach to Revising Chinese-French Dictionary—Resequencing Entry Words, sponsored by Lexicographical Studies Center at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, we put forward three criteria for adjusting trisyllabic words based on their disyllabic. The three criteria suggest to maintain, deprive or restore the use of trisyllabic words as headwords for separate entries. Considering the vastness of this word category, as well as it’s complicated intrinsic semantic relations and diversified grammatical features, this paper takes thirty trisyllabic words that fall in Yang Shujun’s “Nine Structure Categories” as an example to check whether the above three criteria can be applied in reality and promoted widely through a method of word prosody trichotomy (trisyllabic words are classified into three general patterns, namely [1+1+1], [2+1], and [1+2]).