Study On Diachronic Evolution And Synchronic Distribution Of "Lie Down" Conceptual Domain In Chinese

"Lie down" is the basic concept for human beings.This dissertation gives a comprehensive description of the diachronic development and synchronic distribution of "lie down" conceptual domain and explain the relationship between them.According to cross-linguistic materials,we observe the polysemy in other languages in order to discover the semantic proximity and extensional relationship between concepts related to lie down in human cognition and hence the value excavation in linguistic typology.The text is divided into five parts:The introduction introduces the targets,states quo,significance and value of the study,as well as explains research methods,sources of corpus and softwares we utilize.The first chapter describes the diachronic evolution of "lie down" conceptual domain including the forms,sounds,meanings and lexical collocation as well as paradigmatic relations,historical development and geographical distributions of six members in this conceptual domain,which are "qin"(寝)"yan"(偃)"wo"(卧)"tang"(躺)"shui"(睡)"mian"(眠),followed by a summary."Lie down" conceptual domain has experienced three enormous changes which took place in Six Dynasties period,middle period of Ming Dynasty and end of Qing Dynasty respectively.After four periods,the dominating word changed from "wo" to "tang" and formed the situation of Mandarin.The second chapter uses correspondence analysis for the statistical visualization of the development of "lie down" conceptual domain,observes the position changes of members in each periods,delineates the development trace and studies the semantic and pragmatic potentials as well as the competitive or coordinating relations between them with the help of biplot and relative frequency line chart.Finally,the dynamic process of balance-stability in this lexical subsystem are depicted and the reasons are explored afterwards.The third chapter includes synchronic distribution and cross-linguistic research.It focuses on the dialectal distributions of "lie down" words and explains them from historical prospective in order to trace the sources of dialect words and discover their developing process.Then we conduct a survey on polysemes related to "lie down" in 18 languages other than Chinese for the construction of conceptual space and traditional semantic map.On the basis of that,weighted semantic network is built to indicate the semantic adjacency,taking the number of polysemes covering various semantic primes as the weight.Hierarchical clustering analysis is conducted on cross-linguistic materials and relationship between concepts related to lie down is represented by a dendrogram.Both techniques are used to depict the paths of meaning and function extention for the comparison of extention machanism in Chinese and Indo-European languages.The last part draws conclusions on the study above and elucidates the significance in cognitive linguistics,linguistic typology and dialect geography as well as values of basic vocabulary study for lexicology.Then we consider more about problems in the research of Chinese common words,the construction and application of conceptual space and semantic maps.Finally,we look to the future of quantitative methods from corpus linguistics applied in Chinese research and try to offer some practical suggestions.The appendix provides the relative frequency of main members in "lie down"conceptual domain of 20 subdivided periods in Chinese history and polysemy of 64 verbs related to lie down from 22 languages or dialects.