A Study Of Noun-Adjective Lexemes In Chinese-English Dictionaries From The Perspective Of The Two-Level Word Class Categorization Theory

Categorization of word classes especially the heterosemy of lexemes has been the most controversial topic in analytic languages such as Modern English and Modern Chinese since the 20^th century.It is well known that the largest categories among words are nouns,verbs and adjectives,in which the phenomenon of trans-categorization is most likely to take place.However,previous studies on heterosemy lack either a new perspective or an empirical method,and there has been no systematic data-based survey concerning noun-adjective lexemes in Chinese-English dictionaries.Different from the previous studies,this thesis aims to conduct a corpus-based research mainly focusing on the problem concerning noun-adjective lexemes based on two Modern Chinese-English dictionaries from the perspective of the Two-level Word Class Categorization Theory.The results suggest that there are totally 987 objective lexemes in this research,which are included both in A Chinese-English Dictionary(3^rd Edition)（CED3 for short）and New Century Chinese-English Dictionary（2ⁿdd Edition）（NCCED2 for short）,and at the same time are labeled as noun-adjective lexemes at least in one of these two dictionaries.It is indicated that both consistent and inconsistent conditions exist in these two authoritative Chinese-English dictionaries,and the frequency of inconsistent word class labeling between these two authority Chinese-English dictionaries is even up to52.68%with 520 items,which is not only reflected in the inconsistency of the same lexemes in different dictionaries,but also reflected in the inconsistency of the lexemes that have a symmetrical relationship in the same dictionary.Based on the empirical study of a large corpus,it is found that both CED3 and NCCED2 have artificially minimized the quantity of noun-adjective lexemes,which was still influenced by the“Principle of Parsimony”that was put forward by some leading scholars in Chinese grammar.Essentially speaking,the reason lies in that word classes at the lexical level and the syntactic level are not distinguished clearly by those scholars,who regards language as the natural results but not the results of culture inheritance.This study not only finds out the present issues exist on the word class labeling strategies of noun-adjective lexemes in CED3 and NCCED2,but also deepen the study of word class issue in Chinese,and put forward some reasonable suggestions to the compilation of Chinese-English dictionaries.So as to provide effective help to Chinese learners who have English as their mother tongue.