The Lexicographic Treatment of English Negation-Related Phraseological Units

The paper addresses the treatment of negation-related phraseological units in two specialised monolingual dictionaries (the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms and the Oxford Idioms Dictionary for Learners of English). The research is based on a database consisting of 595 phraseological units that are listed in the two dictionaries as negative or co-occurring with negation. Following the well-established distinction between inherently negative lexical items (e.g. nobody, nowhere) and non-negative lexical items licensed by negation and other polarity licensers (e.g., anybody, yet), the paper examines the dictionary entries to determine to what extent this dichotomy is presented in the dictionaries' introductory sections as well as on the level of concrete dictionary entries. The negative or the polarity-sensitive status of a phraseological unit is established by analysing the corpus data obtained from three British English corpora (the BNC, the enTenTen [2012], the UkWaC), and one American English corpus (the COCA). The data analysis shows that the divide between negative and polarity-sensitive phraseological units is not clearly and consistently presented in the two analysed dictionaries, and this may result in a dictionary user's wrong comprehension and usage. The paper puts forth a practical and user-friendly solution in the form of a tripartite model of classification that builds on theoretical considerations as well as real language use and that may be readily adopted by lexicographers.