From corpora to learners' dictionaries: a case study of the function word 'otherwise'

This study examines descriptions of the function word 'otherwise' in five corpus-based learners' dictionaries, and compares these descriptions with findings of an analysis carried out on a sample of contexts for 'otherwise' in the British National Corpus. The results of the study show that there is considerable disagreement between dictionary descriptions, and suggests that fuller descriptions should be available in such dictionaries, especially those in digital format, where space should not be a problem. It also suggests that it might be better not to classify 'otherwise' as an adverb, but to assign it unique grammatical status.