Resumen de When you are explaining the meaning of a word: the effect of abstract noun definition format on syntactic class identification
In recent years, a new lexicographic defining practice has been gaining in popularity in monolingual English learners' dictionaries, that of explaining the meaning of certain abstract nouns with the help of a single-clause when-definition. The present study attempts to investigate the role of the definition of this format, placed in a complete microstracture, in conveying information on the part of speech of nominal headwords. To achieve this aim, tests were designed and ran on several groups of Polish learners of English at the intermediate level. Balanced parallel forms were employed, where single-clause when-definitions were contrasted with their closest analytical analogs in full dictionary entries. It was found that both the new and the classical definition formats resulted in comparably frequent correct POS identification of the headword nouns. This is in stark contrast to the results yielded by Lew and Dziemianko's research (in press), which has inspired the present analysis, where the definition formats were investigated in isolation from other components of the microstracture.
