Study On Semantic Network Of Mental Verbs In Shuowen Jiezi

In Shuowen Jiezi there are 178 key vocabularies related to mental activities distributed in 21 chapters of the whole book. This paper, based on research on theories of semantics, semantic grammar and meta-language, makes a detailed analysis of mental verbs and their meanings, and establishes relevant semantic fields and system of mark- collections. It makes an attempt to establish a semantic network for mental verbs, making a small contribution to establishment of the semantic corpus dealing with ancient Chinese.The paper consists of five major sections as follows:Introduction: In this part, we mainly introduce the purpose and task of the research, the theory and methods for the research and the source of the materials.Chapter 1: Definition of mental verbs and overview on current study. Firstly, a new criterion of defining mental verbs is established in accordance with the specific meanings of every mental verb instead of the old criterion applied in the book. There are mainly three kinds of mental verbs: emotional mental verbs, intentional mental verbs and cognitive mental verbs.Chapter 2: Basis, principles and means of describing. The signs, pattern and procedures of analyzing the semantic features are introduced. Five items are created, namely, semantic class, semantic orientation, semantic primitive, original quantitative features, and social meaning. The limited groups of verbs are also analyzed.Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 present the paradigmatic semantic features according to the dictionary definition and cognitive judgments and provide a semantic identity (ID) for each mental verb. Then, the paper lists the expressive forms of the semantic features of each kind of mental verb groups.Chapter5: The basic pattern of the semantic network of mental verbs in Shuowen Jiezi. On the basis of the above achievements, the paper concludes the rule of semantic distribution and constructs a paradigmatic semantic network in which the core and fringe members are distinguished. It provides necessary elements for semantic formalization and the construction of semantic network and it provides some related parts for building meta language system of Chinese semantic analysis.Conclusion: this chapter summarizes the study on the mental verbs in the book. 178 mental verbs are analyzed with 288 semantic features. The shortcomings and work needed to be done in future study are also mentioned in the chapter.