Quantitative Analysis And Cognitive Account Of The Multi-Category Words In Contemporary Chinese

This dissertation applies quantitative methods to make a whole survey of multi-category words in the "Contemporary Chinese Dictionary"(5th edition). The dissertation can be divided into six chapters.Chapter One is the introductory part that sets out to discuss the research object, research scope, as well as the research objectives and approaches, summarizes the status quo of relevant research and identifies the limitation of the study.Chapter Two inspects the conversion of the monosyllabic words. In view of the multi-category words, the quantity and modes of noun and verb concurrence stand in the first; on the capacity of multi-category words, the capacity of multi-category words of native class on verb is the strongest, while the capacity of multi-category words of derivative class on adverb is the strongest; from the proportion of multi-category words, the preposition's polysemous and lexical capacity of multi-category are the highest, the pronoun's multi-category of native class is the highest, while the auxiliary's multi-category of derivative class is the highest.Chapter Three inspects the conversion of the polysyllable words. In view of the multi-category words, the quantity and modes of noun and verb concurrence stand in the first too; on the capacity of multi-category words, the capacity of multi-category words of native class on verb is the strongest, while the capacity of multi-category words of derivative class on verb and noun is the strongest; from the proportion of multi-category words, the auxiliary's polysemous capacity of multi-category is the highest, the num's and the interjection's multi-category of native class are the highest, the quantifier's multi-category of derivative class is the highest, while the preposition's multi-category of derivative class is the highest.Chapter Four compares monosyllabic multi-category words with polysyllable multi-category words from the aspects of pattern, quantity, type, mode, capacity and proportion. In the case of two-category class, the number of monosyllabic multi-category words are more than that of polysyllable multi-category words in all parts of speech. All the parts of speech in monosyllabic and polysyllable can be the native class, and is at least one part of speech, but as a derivative class, only monosyllabic words can be derived by all the parts of speech.Chapter Five inspects the causes of the occurrence of the multi-category words from the perspectives of extension of word meaning, flexible application of words, language contact, dialect influence, grammaticalization etc, and points out the basic reason of the occurrence is the conversion of lexical semantics-syntactic function.Chapter Six examines multi-category words based on the theories of cognitive linguistics that considers the forming process of multi-category words is the recategorization process, in which such mechanisms as grammatical metonymy, grammatical metaphor, conceptual reification, and lexical metaphor play an important role.