Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Endre Abkarovits: The -ing form after finite verbs in the reference books of the nineties

ENDRE ABKAROVITS THE -ING FORM AFTER FINITE VERBS IN THE REFERENCE BOOKS OF THE NINETIES Abstract: The author compared the information offered by some of the most widely-used reference books on the use of non-finite constructions after transitive fmites in a paper at the end of the eighties. The findings were rather embarrasing, but as the authors could rely only on their own intuition or on research carried out among a restricted number of native speakers of English at that time, the contradictions were inevitable. After a brief survey of the revolutionary changes that have taken place in the past few years the present paper attempts at comparing the information given by the new generation of corpus-based learner's dictionaries and some new grammar books to see if any improvements have been achieved in this field. Although one would expect a more unanimous picture when the compilers of the dictionaries all claim to have drawn their conclusions from some huge, and consequently reliable database, the present findings are not much less confusing than those a decade ago in spite of the general positive development in lexicography. 1 Recent developments in lexicography In the past ten years there have been revolutionary changes in the field of lexicography. Until 1987 the market of monolingual English learner's dictionaries was dominated by Oxford's Advanced Learner's Dictionary, first edited by A.S. Hornby in 1948. Then a rivalry started between Longman and Oxford. In 1987 the first edition of Collins COBUILD English Dictionary was published, the first dictionary with all the conclusions from the data of their own corpus, 20 million strong at that time. COBUILD broke with the traditional approach of lexicographers, who had invented their own examples, relying on their own intuition. COBUILD has always been 81