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A literature review of bilingual dictionary research in Malaysia shows that most research has focused on the problems of equivalents recorded in bilingual dictionaries. What is lacking is proper linguistic analysis of the discrimination of meaning for the source language entry and the findings of the target language equivalents. This paper attempts to fill this research gap by investigating the problems that arise in the discrimination of meanings of two Malay-English dictionaries, and the English equivalents. The analysis adopts the methods of frame semantics in describing the Malay verb memberi, assessing the different senses of meaning through the frames that are available. The theoretical framework of Frame Semantics has successfully helped the writer to reorganise the meaning of the Malay transitive verb memberi (translation in English "give") from the different frames evoked by the entry. Meanwhile, the information of the lexical units (LU) provided by the frames, for example the LUs from the frame of GIVING in the FrameNet database have contributed to a list of English equivalents that can be used in the Malay-English dictionary entry. This frame-based analysis relies on the 5 million words Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka-Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (DBP-UKM) Malay corpus while all the English equivalents are sourced from FrameNet and English dictionaries.
Keywords: bilingual dictionary, discrimination of meanings, Frame Semantics, FrameNet, corpus based analysis
INTRODUCTION
Bilingual dictionaries play an important role as a reference for information related to a specific pair of languages. Bilingual dictionaries not only provide information on the equivalents and meanings of a word but also other linguistic information including morphology, syntax, contexts of meaning as well as the socio-cultural information. Despite its important contribution to the field, research on bilingual dictionaries has received little attention in the Malaysian context. A review of research, particularly on Malay-English bilingual dictionaries suggests that there is still much to be explored. As Ibrahim (2005) argues, Malay lexicography focuses solely on compiling rather than researching dictionaries.
Research on bilingual dictionaries primarily focuses on the problems and the lack of equivalents for the entries (Noresah and Fadilah, 2003; Fadilah, 2005). Given this, the present study looks at another aspect of a bilingual dictionary namely, the meaning discrimination of an entry that includes semantic information of the senses that belong to an...