Adjective Clauses in -er Suffix of Occupation Definitions in Online Dictionaries

Learners’ dictionaries are often intended to assist students with distinct proficiency levels. However, few studies have shown how dictionaries with different intended users were compared. This paper aimed to compare and contrast adjective clauses in -er suffix occupation definitions in two online dictionaries. Data, consisting of 33 occupation words with the suffix -er, such as ‘barber’ and ‘waiter’, were collected from the online Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) and the online Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD) using purposive sampling. The data were analysed using syntactic analysis, focusing on the components of adjective clauses. The results showed the head noun of the adjective clauses differed; LDOCE used pronouns most frequently (80.6%), while OALD used noun phrases only (100%). The relative pronoun ‘who’ was used more frequently in LDOCE (48.4%) and ‘whose’ in OALD (62.5%). Transitive verbs were used the most in LDOCE (48.4%), but in OALD, it was linking verbs (57.9%). The additional information that affected the length of the adjective clauses was longer in OALD compared to LDOCE. The study results provide pedagogical implications for English learning-teaching by utilizing online dictionaries. English teachers and learners are encouraged to integrate dictionaries into the learning-teaching activities.


INTRODUCTION
A dictionary comprises the vocabulary list of a language. The meaning of every standardized word of a language is described in a dictionary with other details depending on the kind of the dictionary. It can take various forms, from the printed, CD, and electronic, to even, as the technology grows over time, the online ones, whether monolingual or bilingual (Jin & Deifell, 2013). Its features and contents get updated over time to provide the latest words and assist the users (Li & Xu, 2015). In an online dictionary, it is even possible not only to look up a single word just like a printed one but a group of words (Lew, 2012). It can be helpful for native people or, even more importantly, for those trying to learn a new language (Utakrit & Fama, 2020).
The entries in a dictionary may help users learn information other than the words' meanings, such as pronunciation, word classes, and even syntactic components. Every word accumulated in a dictionary has its description; it can even have multiple definitions depending on the context or word class. Those descriptions can be in the form of a sentence. For example, the description of the word singer from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary is 'a person who sings, or whose job is singing, especially in public'. In a word description from a dictionary, the users can break down the elements, from the articles (a), relative pronouns (who/whose), phrases (a person, is singing), to clauses (whose job is singing). Especially for learners who still have problems constructing grammatically correct clauses and sentences, a dictionary can be beneficial (Utakrit & Fama, 2020) as it provides actual and grammatically and contextually accurate examples.
Even though many studies have investigated the use of dictionaries in learning, and some compared different dictionaries, only a few studied clause constructions used in the word definitions (Hoey, 1995;Osselton, 2007;Ptasznik, 2020), especially the adjective clauses. In this study, the researchers were interested in the construction of adjective clauses used in two online dictionaries to describe the meaning of a word. EFL students often struggle with the construction of clauses, and the struggle with adjective clause construction is relatively high (Haryanti & Setyandari, 2018;Subekti, 2017). The students' challenges in adjective clauses include incomplete sentences (dependent clause), imprecise choices of adjective pronouns, and inaccurate choices of adjective clauses compared to other clauses (Haryanti & Setyandari, 2018;Subekti, 2017). The teachers and students may observe those elements of adjective clause constructions within the word definitions in dictionaries to gain examples of the appropriate formation and use of adjective clauses.
Therefore, this study explored the adjective clause constructions in the dictionaries. In addition, some dictionaries are more suitable for beginner students such as the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and those for more advanced students such as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (Kizi, 2020). Hence, the researchers were interested in comparing the adjective clauses in the word descriptions from both dictionaries to see how dictionaries for different proficiency levels differ in the word definitions. The research question was formulated as follows: • How were the adjective clauses in -er suffix occupations manifested in the online Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary?

Dictionaries
A dictionary compiles information about the vocabulary of a language. In dictionaries, rich information about words is provided with various labels, phonetic transcriptions, examples, and other details (Wilson et al., 2020), though the definitions might be without any context. A dictionary is an "alphabetical list of words presenting meaning and consists of pronunciation information, definitions, and etymology" (Rohmatillah, 2016, p. 3). A dictionary may be monolingual, bilingual, bilingualized, or even multilingual (Rohmatillah, 2016). One example of multilingual dictionaries in Indonesia is Indonesian-English-Arabic, while the bilingualized one uses two languages (Rohmatillah, 2016). Both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries have their uses, especially for students. The monolingual dictionaries often provide more features about the word, such as grammar, collocation, and word register, while the bilingual ones provide the meaning, though students might get confused with the provided features and examples (Rohmatillah, 2016;Wilson et al., 2020).
In a recent development, monolingual English dictionaries that gather slang words or idioms, such as U-Dictionary, emerge as a corpus (Nguyen et al., 2018). It can help the non-native speakers to keep up with the most updated entries developed in different English-speaking cultures. Regarding the forms of the dictionary, it can be in the form of printed (Lew, 2012), visual, or electronic, and, as the technology rapidly grows, there is an online version of a dictionary (Jin & Deifell, 2013). One famous dictionary, MacMillan English Dictionary, even started to operate as an online dictionary only (Li & Xu, 2015).

Adjective Clauses
An adjective clause is one of the English clauses. A series of words with a subject and predicate can be a clause (Azar, 1999). Apart from its characteristic, which consists of at least one subject and verb, a clause may include other related information, like 'complement' and 'adjunct' (Radford, 1997). It is a smaller chunk than a sentence, but more significant than a phrase (Crystal, 1987), though it can be a sentence (Subekti, 2017). An adjective is a word class whose function describes or modifies a noun (Haryanti & Setyandari, 2018;Subekti, 2017). The function of an adjective clause is similar to an adjective, which is to alter a noun (Azar, 1999), though it might not have any adjective class words inside the clause. An adjective clause, otherwise known as a relative clause, is often preceded by a relative pronoun to introduce the noun that the adjective clause modifies. The relative pronouns include who, which, whom, that, whose, where, or when (Haryanti & Setyandari, 2018).
[1] The man who is standing by the door is tall.
[2] The man, who is standing by the door, is tall.
As a clause can be a potential sentence, the pattern of a clause is similar to a sentence. In example [1], the pattern is SV+A, with 'who' as the subject and 'is standing' as the predicate. In a sentence pattern, the adverbial can be before or after a verb. In a clause, the adverbial is commonly after the verb. Frank (1972) proposed two forms of adjective clauses: defining and non-defining adjective clauses, whose usages are differentiated by commas. In example [1], the adjective clause gives necessary information to distinguish or specify the subject from other people, while in example [2], the adjective clause acts as an appositive, which provides additional information.
The descriptions of occupation words in dictionaries include adjective clauses. This study analysed adjective clause constructions using the occupation words with the suffix -er. Occupation words, like nouns, can be derived from verbs. The affixation process causes the word class to change (Crystal, 1987). The verbs that undergo the affixation process with derivational morphemes turn into new words and change into noun class words. According to Ljubičić (2018), several suffixes can change verbs into job titles as the noun form, including -er, -ee, -or, -ant, -ent, -ist, -eer, -ian, -ster, -ive, -ic. -ess, and -ie. Both LDOCE and OALD had occupation topics that provided the occupation words; some underwent affixation (e.g., 'trainee', 'typist', 'teacher'), and some did not (e.g., 'cook'). A part of those occupation words had a -er suffix. For example, the word singer is from the verb sing and suffix -er. The affixation process indicates the subject who does the work (Martini, 2016). The adjective clause is used to modify the subject and may contain information about the action the said subject does (Martini, 2016). Hence, occupation words would support this study to analyse the adjective clause construction in dictionaries.

Previous Related Studies
Aside from the vocabulary, dictionaries provide proper uses or grammar. Whether it is the definitions, which are the descriptions of the words and might be decontextualized, or the sentence examples, which are more in context, dictionaries can be used as the sources of grammatically correct sentences. Various kinds of dictionaries have their benefits for learning. In the case of online dictionaries, they can support learning as it is portable (Li & Xu, 2015) and can adapt to users' needs, such as quickly finding a word or even a group of words (Lew, 2012). Different features, labels, and information given in dictionaries make each dictionary unique.
Previous studies have focused on dictionaries. For example, to compare printed dictionaries, which are also available for computer use, Abalkheel (2020) reviewed The American Heritage College Dictionary and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary for linguistics student context and showed that both dictionaries were beneficial for linguistics students who studied English as the second language (ESL). As for the online dictionaries, Jin and Deifell (2013) researched the students' preferred online dictionaries to learn in eight different languages. Each language had its preferred dictionary by the students, for example, nciku.com (Chinese), jisho.org (Japanese), or spandict.com (Spanish). In addition, Kizi (2020) studied and compiled eight reliable online dictionaries for learning based on their entries, additional features, and target users' language levels.
However, the studies on clause constructions in dictionaries were still lacking. Regarding the investigation of clauses in dictionaries, Hoey (1995) compared and contrasted the clauses within word definitions in a dictionary, which showed the adjective clause constructions in parallel word definition pairs in dictionary entries. Osselton (2007) also investigated the when-clauses in word definitions from English learners' dictionaries and found that the clauses in some dictionaries were often shortened. Ptasznik (2020) shared the use of single-clause when-definition format for word definitions in dictionaries and elaborated on the constructions of single-clause when-definition models for word definitions. To contribute to the existing knowledge on this topic, this study wanted to compare the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (ldoceonline.com), which is pre-intermediate user friendly (Kizi, 2020), and Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionaries (oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com), which is suitable for upper-intermediate to advanced students (Kizi, 2020), especially on their adjective clauses in the word definitions.

Source of Data and Data Collection Procedure
This paper explored the adjective clauses used in word definitions from the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) and Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionaries (OALD). This study used a descriptive design that systematically analysed the data in the form of adjective clauses from word definitions (Ary et al., 2010). The words analysed in this study were occupation words with theer suffix, which may refer to "AGENT, PATIENT, INSTRUMENT, and INHABITANT nouns" (Kawaletz & Plag, 2015, p. 2). The AGENT function indicates the person who does the action denoted by the verb word, and it generally becomes an occupation name. For example, the verb 'sing' with the suffix -er becomes a noun 'singer', defined as 'a person who sings' (LDOCE); thus, the word 'singer' refers to AGENT. Other examples are, for instance, a 'loaner' (PATIENT), a 'cooker' (INSTRUMENT), and an 'Aucklander' (INHABITANT).
The occupation entries with the suffix -er were collected from each dictionary as the criteria for the purposive sampling (Ary et al., 2010). This research used 31 occupation samples from LDOCE and 32 from OALD. The purposive sampling was used to select the occupations with the -er suffix. However, LDOCE did not have 2 out of 33 selected occupation words, resulting in 31 samples, while OALD did not have 1 out of 33 occupation words, resulting in 32 samples. The data were collected in April 2021 from the online dictionary websites https://www.ldoceonline.com and https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com. Syntactic analysis was used to examine the collected adjective clauses. The syntactic analysis helps to observe the structures and elements that construct clauses (O'Grady, 2010). The analysis of the adjective clauses from both dictionaries covered the head nouns modified by the adjective clauses, the relative pronouns used to introduce the adjective clauses, the verb forms that followed the relative pronoun, the subject complements, and the additional information, based on the theories from Radford (1997) and Azar (1999) regarding the components of an adjective clause. The instrument for this study was a structured observation sheet to note the existing data based on the keywords (Lambert, 2012). In this study, the keywords were the criteria or the instrument items in the form of adjective clause elements. The instrument had five items to note the head noun, relative pronoun, verb form, subject complement, and additional information. The data were then tabulated and presented in tables with percentages. The discussion compared and contrasted the results from both dictionaries.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In this section, the results of the research question are presented. In breaking down the adjective clauses from both dictionaries, the analysis was divided into five categories: the head noun, relative pronoun, verb form, subject complement form, and additional information.

Head Noun
The head nouns that were modified by the adjective phrase differed in LDOCE and OALD. The possible forms for head nouns were pronouns or noun phrases. In Table 1, 25 analysed occupation words in LDOCE used the pronoun, 'someone', as the head noun (80.6%), and six of them used noun phrases (19.4%). In contrast, OALD only used noun phrases as the head noun. Both the pronoun and the noun phrase may be used as the head noun of an adjective clause, in line with Azar (1999).

Relative Pronoun
To signal the adjective clause, a relative pronoun was used after the head noun. In both dictionaries, the used relative pronouns were 'who', 'whose', and 'that' (Table  2). In LDOCE, the relative pronoun 'who' was used the most in 15 out of 31 samples (48.4%), followed by 'whose' in 13 samples (41.9%), and 'that' in three samples (9.7%). In OALD, 'whose' was used the most in 20 out of 32 samples (62.5%), followed by 'who' in 11 samples (34.4%), and 'that' in one sample (3.1%).
In both dictionaries, the relative pronoun 'whose' was always followed by a job, while 'who' and 'that' were always followed by the present singular form of the verb (V1(s/es)). The higher use of 'whose' was in contrast to Haryanti and Setyandari (2018).

Verb Form
Aside from the subject, the defining feature of a clause is a predicate. The used predicates in both dictionaries were transitive, intransitive, and linking verbs (Table  3), in line with Radford (1997) and Azar (1999). In LDOCE, the most used verb form was transitive verbs in 15 out of 31 samples (48.4%). The linking verb was the second most used verb in 14 samples (42%), and the intransitive verb was used the least in two samples (6.4%). In OALD, however, the most used verb form was the linking verb in 19 out of 32 samples (59.4%), followed by transitive verbs (31.2%) and intransitive verbs (9.4%).

Subject Complement Form
The additional differentiating factor for the adjective phrases in both dictionaries was the subject complement following the linking verbs. As the number of adjective clauses that used linking verbs differed in LDOCE and OALD, the number of subject complements also differed. The subject complements found were gerund, to-infinitive, and adverb, in line with Conti (2011). The most used subject complement in both dictionaries was to-infinitive, found in 11 samples in both dictionaries (78.6% in LDOCE, and 57.9% in OALD). The second most used form of subject complement was gerund: two samples in LDOCE (14.3%), and seven samples in OALD (36.8%). The least used form was adverbial, which was only used once in both dictionaries. Those four categories were the structural elements that distinguished the adjective phrases from the word definitions in LDOCE and OALD. Three of them were the basic components of an adjective clause (head noun, relative pronoun, and verb). The last category was the additional differentiating factor, the subject complement, which only differed in the number of gerunds used.
The head nouns used in LDOCE were in pronouns and noun phrases, while in OALD the head nouns were only in noun phrases. The dominant form of the head noun in LDOCE was the pronoun 'someone', while the noun phrase was 'a person' in OALD. The use of the singular form for the head noun helped the students identify the countability of the noun being described, supporting the finding from Chan (2017) that dictionaries helped students identify the countability. For the noun phrase, some unique cases were found in each dictionary. The noun phrase 'a man' in example (1) was only used in LDOCE. Similarly, in example (4), the compound subject a person, 'company', or 'shop' was also only used in LDOCE. On the other hand, in (2), a noun phrase with a post-modifier (a person working in a hospital) was only used in OALD. The other noun phrases, 'a scientist' and 'a person' or 'a company', had the same occurrence in both dictionaries. In some word descriptions, the head noun was the only differentiating factor for both dictionaries (in (3)).
(1) A man who serves food and drink at the tables in a restaurant. (waiter-LDOCE) A person whose job is to serve customers at their tables in a restaurant, etc. (waiter-OALD) (2) A person, company, or shop that makes or sells jewellery. (jeweller-LDOCE) A person who makes, repairs, or sells jewellery and watches. (jeweller-OALD) (3) Someone whose job is to take X-ray photographs of the inside of people's bodies, or who treats people for illnesses using an X-ray machine. (radiographer-LDOCE) A person working in a hospital whose job is to take X-ray photographs to help with medical examinations. (radiographer-OALD) (4) A man whose job is to cut men's hair and sometimes to shave them. (barber-LDOCE) A person whose job is to cut men's hair and sometimes to shave them. (barber-OALD) The relative pronoun followed the head noun to indicate the adjective clause. The relative pronoun 'that' was used the least (in (2)). As stated by Azar (1999), 'that' refers to both human and thing, which is less specific, while 'who' refers to a person and 'whose' shows possession. That is helpful for students since they can use that in general but often struggle with the slightly different use of 'who' and 'whose' (Haryanti & Setyandari, 2018). Those three relative pronouns were used in both dictionaries. However, 'who', whose usage is directly followed by verbs like in example (1), was dominant in LDOCE, and 'whose', whose use needs to be followed by a noun, was dominant in OALD (in (3)).
There were three verb forms following the relative pronoun used in the LDOCE and OALD dictionaries. As clauses have similar patterns to sentences, the use of those three verb forms was in line with the sentence patterns in Burton-Roberts (2016). The most used one in LDOCE was transitive verbs, while in OALD, it was linking verbs. In (5), LDOCE used transitive verbs ('makes', 'pours', and 'serves'), while OALD used intransitive verbs ('work'). In example (6), LDOCE also used a transitive verb ('writes'), and OALD used a linking verb ('is').
(5) Someone who makes, pours and serves drinks in a bar or restaurant. (bartender-LDOCE) A person who works in a bar, serving drinks. (bartender-OALD) (6) Someone who writes books, stories, etc., especially as a job. (writer-LDOCE) A person whose job is writing books, stories, articles, etc. (writer-OALD) Though they were used less in LDOCE, linking verbs were used in significant numbers in both dictionaries. The subject complements that followed the linking verbs in both dictionaries were gerunds, to-infinitives, and adverbials. If both dictionaries used linking verbs to describe a word, they used a similar form of subject complement (either both gerunds, both to-infinitives, or both adverbials); if the subject compliment was either gerund or to-infinitive, both dictionaries derived the subject complement from the same verb (in (7) and (8)). Gerund, like in example (7) ('making and repairing'), was used less in both dictionaries. To-infinitive form was used significantly higher in both dictionaries, such as (8) ('to clean'). This is in line with Conti (2011) that to-infinitive is used more for subject or subject complement. The adverbials were used to describe the same word in both dictionaries (in (9)) for the officer.
(7) Someone whose job is making and repairing wooden objects. (carpenter-LDOCE) A person whose job is making and repairing wooden objects and structures. (carpenter-LDOCE) (8) Someone whose job is to clean other people's houses, offices, etc. (cleaner-LDOCE) A person whose job is to clean other people's houses or offices, etc. (cleaner-LDOCE) (9) Someone who is in a position of authority in the army, navy, etc. (officer-LDOCE) A person who is in a position of authority in the armed forces. (officer-OALD)

Additional Information
The other differentiating factor of the adjective clauses in both dictionaries was the additional information that added details to the word descriptions. The additional information was the objects or the adverbials. In example (10), the word descriptions from both dictionaries were the same until the verb ('sings'); however, OALD added more information. The longer and more complex description usually indicates the higher literacy of the target reader (Biber, 2004). The length of the adjective clauses was longer in OALD generally because of the additional information. However, some word descriptions in OALD were shorter, like in example (11) that used 'astronomy' as the object instead to cover stars, planets, and other sky objects. The additional information for the word definition could affect meaning acquisition for students because language learners need adequate information that can help them differentiate one definition from another (Li & Xu, 2015).
(10) Someone who sings. (singer-LDOCE) A person who sings, or whose job is singing, especially in public. (singer-OALD) (11) A scientist who studies the stars and planets. (astronomer-LDOCE) A scientist who studies astronomy. (astronomer-OALD) Some jobs with the suffix -er were not available in either LDOCE or OALD. In example (12), the word 'videographer' was available in LDOCE, but there was not any entry of this word in OALD. In contrast, the word 'demographer' was available in OALD but not in LDOCE. The construction of adjective clauses in this research included the head nouns that were modified, relative pronouns, verb forms, forms of subject complement, and additional information. The head nouns modified in both dictionaries were in the forms of pronouns and noun phrases, in line with Azar (1999), who suggests that both forms of head nouns were appropriate to be modified with adjective clauses. As in the relative pronouns, LDOCE used 'who' more, while OALD used 'whose' more. The higher use of 'whose' was intriguing because it was in contrast to Haryanti and Setyandari (2018), as the relative pronoun 'whose' was used the least frequently. The verb forms used in the adjective clauses included transitive, intransitive, and linking verbs, in line with Radford (1997), though LDOCE used transitive verbs more and OALD used linking verbs more. As the linking verbs were also used, the adjective clauses used subject complements, which were in line with Azar (1999) and Conti (2011). Both dictionaries used to -infinitive to be the subject complement the most. To add specific information to the word definitions, the adjective clauses provided additional information of various lengths. LDOCE and OALD provided more complex descriptions of different words to make the definitions clearer (Biber, 2004).

Pedagogical Implications for English Learning-Teaching
The use of online dictionaries can help the students build their language knowledge. Online dictionaries can help to find the meaning of words and understand a string of words or sentences in the grammatical aspect (Jin & Deifell, 2013). Since students struggle with adjective clauses more than other clauses (Pakdel & Khansir, 2017), teachers can use online dictionaries to provide grammatically correct usages of adjective clauses. By observing the head noun of the adjective clause that the dictionaries offer, the students can identify the countability of the job words (Chan, 2017). The word definitions also vary the use of relative pronouns 'who', 'whose', and 'that'. As students often have difficulties with those pronouns (Haryanti & Setyandari, 2018), they can identify the relative pronoun used in the dictionary to improve their adjective clauses.
As for the verb forms, the variety supports the sentence patterns by Burton-Roberts (2016), and for Indonesian learners, the patterns of the adjective clauses in English are similar to those in Indonesian (Hamsa & Weda, 2019). Especially to follow linking verbs, the students can observe the alternatives other than to-infinitive that is more commonly used (Conti, 2011). Last but not least, both dictionaries had clear definitions, which hopefully could help the students' understanding and analysis in distinguishing contrasting word definitions (Li & Xu, 2015).

CONCLUSION
This paper explored and compared the use of adjective clauses for word descriptions in online dictionaries of LDOCE and OALD. The results showed that the components of adjective clause (head noun, relative pronoun, and verb form), subject complement form, and the additional information made the adjective clauses in both dictionaries different. The most used head noun in LDOCE was pronoun ('someone') and noun phrase ('a person') in OALD. In some cases, the head noun was the only different part of the word description; for the relative pronoun, 'who' was used more in LDOCE, while 'whose' was used more in OALD. The verb form used the most in LDOCE was transitive verbs, but the linking verb was used more in OALD. The subject complements that followed the linking verbs in both dictionaries were in the to -infinitive form the most. In addition, if both dictionaries used linking verbs for a word, the subject complement took the same form. Lastly, the additional information, such as objects and adverbials, caused the adjective clauses in OALD to be generally longer than LDOCE. Three definitions of -er suffix occupations are unavailable: 'choreographer' and 'demographer' in LDOCE and 'videographer' in OALD entries. This research is limited to the number of the observed words. Future researchers can investigate more words from different categories, use other dictionaries, or observe different language constructions. This study implies that by finding the right words, such as occupation words, teachers can find examples of proper grammar, and language learners may use online dictionaries to acquire the examples of adjective clause uses. Therefore, teachers may integrate online dictionaries in language learning to find meaning, observe grammar and syntactic constructions, and select dictionaries to tailor students' language knowledge and needs.