Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies (CLDS) view the dictionary as a discourse and emphasize an ideological, ethico-political dimension to the lexicographical process. Combining CLDS with Systemic Functional Linguistics, this paper looks into how anthropocentrism is manifested linguistically in Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (Seventh Edition), the most influential authoritative general-purpose Chinese dictionary, by examining the transitivity and appraisal patterns in the definition texts concerning animals and plants. The analysis shows that animals and plants are seldom assigned agency in their own right and that the animals and plants are evaluated either positively or negatively according to whether they are useful to the human beings while their intrinsic value is ignored. In particular, animals are highlighted for their agricultural and medicinal use and plants for their medicinal and ornamental value. However, compared with its previous editions, the dictionary has shown an enhanced awareness of environmental protection by deleting the encyclopaedic information that describes the use of some rare animals’ meat, bones and fur. It is argued that, although modern general-purpose dictionaries are increasingly corpus-based and descriptive, their role in shaping social values and stances cannot be disregarded. Dictionary makers need to balance what words mean with what they can be said to mean or be allowed to mean (Moon, 2014). The study contributes to unmasking and denaturalizing the hidden ideology in colony texts such as the dictionary, enhances a critical use of dictionaries and helps develop the theory of critical lexicography and emerging ecolexicography.

中文翻译：

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当代汉语词典中的人类中心主义：批判词典话语研究与系统功能语言学的协同视角


批判性词典话语研究 （CLDS） 将词典视为一种话语，并强调词典编纂过程的意识形态、伦理政治维度。本文将 CLDS 与系统功能语言学相结合，通过考察动植物定义文本中的及物性和评价模式，探讨了人类中心主义在最具影响力的权威通用汉语词典《现代汉语词典（第七版）》中的语言表现形式。分析表明，动植物很少被赋予自身的能动性，动植物根据它们是否对人类有用而被正面或负面评价，而它们的内在价值却被忽视了。特别是，动物因其农业和药用价值而受到强调，植物因其药用和观赏价值而受到强调。然而，与以前的版本相比，该词典删除了描述一些稀有动物的肉、骨头和毛皮使用的百科全书式信息，显示出增强的环保意识。有人认为，尽管现代通用词典越来越基于语料库和描述性，但它们在塑造社会价值观和立场方面的作用不容忽视。词典制作者需要平衡单词的含义与它们可以说成的含义或被允许的含义（Moon，2014 年）。这项研究有助于揭开词典等殖民地文本中隐藏的意识形态并使其去自然化，加强对词典的批判性使用，并有助于发展批判性词典编纂理论和新兴的生态词典编纂。