The Study, Based On Cognitive Linguistics, Modern Chinese Shape Quantifier Meaning

Among all the Chinese word classes, classifiers is the one with most distinctive national features, as well as the word class that foreigners make the most errors of. We think that appearance classifiers are those, which can semantically reflect the appearance traits of objects. In the thesis, we select 29 appearance classifiers from the whole classifier system of modern Chinese, in which 9 groups of appearance classifier synonyms are the main objects of our study.The thesis can be divided into 3 chapters. Chapter 1: To discuss the value of the subject and review the researches on Chinese classifiers mainly from the fields of definition, classification, lexical characteristics, appearance reflections, and teaching methods of Chinese classifiers, etc. Chapter 2: To discriminate the appearance classifier synonyms. First, we define appearance classifier synonyms. Then we discriminate all the 9 groups of the appearance classifier synonyms basic on the categories of dot-shaped classifier synonyms, stripe-shaped classifier synonyms, plane-shaped classifier synonyms, and three-dimensional classifier synonyms. The study is carried out from the angle of the semantic meaning analysis of classifiers in classifier-noun combinations. The corpus are mainly taken from "Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU". In order to describe the lexical feature and distributional regulations of each group of the appearance classifier synonyms, static description-dynamic analysis method and quantitative statistics-qualitative analysis method are used in this chapter. Eventually we summarize the 4 main differences comprehensively between (or among) each member within an appearance classifier synonym, which are: lexical emphasis, extensional capacity, rhetorical effects and genre flavor. Chapter 3: We try to explain the appearance classifiers phenomenon, basic on series of cognitive linguistic theories, including Categorized Prototype Theory, Family Resemblance Theory, Image Theory, and Metaphor & Metonym Theory, etc. Three issues are discussed in this chapter: 1. The internal reasons of the combinations between appearance classifiers and nouns; 2. The lexical distributions and extensional traces of appearance classifiers; 3. The lexical extensional patterns of appearance classifiers.