A Study On The Returned Words In Modern Chinese

The verb-group meaning "going back" contains five words including "Gui","Huan","Hui","Fan","Fu". Based on a common image schema, the five words belong to the same semantic field, and have common semantic basis, but still different from each other.The five verbs are with their own distinctive features and independent of each other:"Gui" originally means woman getting married, once a woman married, she was regarded as a man’s "belonging", while in the process of Chinese development "Gui" lost its original meaning, but this [+affiliated] continues to the modern Chinese, becoming the distinguishing feature of "Gui"."Huan" has a strong tendency of showing [+motivation]. "Huan" original means "return", which gradually disappeared during the development of Chinese, and now "Huan" is used more often for "giving back", and "reward people for their actions".The usage of "Hui" in the whole history of Chinese shows a tendency of going up rapidly, there’s a long stage of development before "Hui" lost its original meaning and got the meaning of "going back". In modern Chinese "Hui" shows a difference of [+process]."Fan(返)" used to write as "Fan(反)", the two characters became separated in the mediaeval times. It is this kinship to "Fan(反)" made "Fan(返)" expresses a tendency of [+reverse], and it focuses on describing an object going in the opposite direction."Fu" has been in a stable state during the development of the long history of Chinese language, there’s no big difference between modern Chinese and ancient Chinese. "Fu" does not tend to show the process or the path of an object moving, instead it focuses on the performance results, thus has a feature of [+result].The distinguishing features of the verb-group meaning "going back" are evolved from the history of Chinese language. "Gui,Huan, Hui,Fan,Fu" these five words were different from each other in meaning and function, but they were complement for each other. After the long process of developing, the redundant components were eliminated and the distinguishing parts are retained, the pattern of the modern Chinese gradually completed.