A Study On Synonymous Words With Same Morphemes But Different Order In “May Fourth” Vernacular Novels

The "May Fourth" vernacular showed an obvious transitional nature in language,and the "May Fourth" vernacular novels are an important carrier to reflect its transitional feature.Synonymous words with same morphemes but different order have unique characteristics in the "May Fourth" vernacular novels.Research on them will help promote the research on the history of Chinese vocabulary and the vernacular,and provide a reference for the vocabulary teaching of vernacular novels.This article is based on a self-built corpus,which selects 13 writers from the "May Fourth" period,with a total of 130 vernacular novels.This research uses the method of combining quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis to examine synonymous words with same morphemes but different order in the "May Fourth" vernacular novels from two perspectives:synchronic and diachronic.In terms of synchronicity,it mainly examines the external forms and internal grammatical and semantic relationship of these synonymous word pairs;in terms of diachronism,it mainly examines the potential and appearance situation of these words in the diachronic development of modern Chinese.This thesis is divided into six parts.The introduction mainly introduces the background,research significance,literature review and research methods.Chapter 1 explains the definition and selection methods of synonymous words with same morphemes but different order,and explains the statistical data.From chapter 2 to Chapter 3,we discuss the distribution of type and token,part of speech and word meaning of these synonymous words.The causes of their distribution are also analyzed.Chapter 4 discusses the potential and appearance situation of these synonymous words in the diachronic development of modern Chinese,and explores the relevant factors that affect the result.The conclusion part of the thesis summarizes the full text and points out the deficiencies.The main conclusions of this thesis are as follows:The synonymous word with same morphemes but different order in the "May Fourth" vernacular novels reflect the complex and "disordered" state of language in the "May Fourth" period.From the perspective of the external forms of these synonymous words,its characteristics are mainly manifested in the richness of types and the difference from modern Chinese in terms of token.In terms of word type,the use cases in the "May Fourth" vernacular novels are rich and diverse,which are obviously more than those in modern Chinese.In terms of word token,most of the synonymous words are consistent with modern Chinese in use;a few are significantly different from modern Chinese,which shows that the uncommon forms in modern Chinese were commonly used in the "May Fourth" period.The distribution characteristics of type and token are caused by factors such as the "May Fourth" vernacular inheriting classical Chinese vocabulary and absorbing Japanese Chinese words.From the perspective of the internal grammatical and semantic relations of these synonymous word pairs,their characteristics are mainly reflected in part of speech and word meaning.In terms of parts of speech,the synonymous words with same morphemes but different order retrieved in the130 novels are all notional words,which can be divided into two categories: the same part of speech and the different part of speech.The former constitutes the main body of synonymous words in all novels,while the latter is less numerous.In terms of specific parts of speech,the overall distribution characteristics of these two categories of words are that verbs account for the largest proportion,followed by nouns and adjectives.This distribution characteristic is closely related to the narrative of fiction.The word-meaning relationship within the synonymous word pairs can be divided into three categories: word meaning equivalence,word meaning inclusion and word meaning cross.Among them,those with same word meanings have an absolute advantage in quantity,followed by those with inclusive word meanings,and the least number of those with cross word meanings.Among the synonymous word pairs with same word meanings,the number of monosemous words is the largest,and the number of polysemy is less.The potential and appearance of synonymous words with same morphemes but different order includes two aspects: word type and word meaning.(1)From the point of view of word type: in terms of result of the potential and appearance,it is mainly manifested as two forms are explicit,AB is explicit,but BA is implicit,and both forms are implicit.The words with different word-meaning relationships have different results in potential and appearance.In the word pairs with same lexical meaning,the result is mainly as follows: AB is explicit while BA is implicit.Among the words pairs that the sense of one word contains the sense of another one,the proportion of words which AB is explicit and BA is implicit is roughly equal to the proportion of words which AB and BA are both explicit.In the word pairs whose meanings are crossed,the result shows that both expressions are explicit.In terms of factors affecting the results of word types,it mainly includes the language economy principle,the relationship between word meanings and the trend of word usage.In addition,among the synonymous words with same meanings,the potential and appearance is also affected by the word structure,grammatical habits,four-tone sequence,meaning sequence and other factors.(2)From the point of view of word meaning: in terms of result of the potential and appearance,it is mainly manifested in the increase and decrease of sense of polysemy.The increase of the senses of polysemy mainly occurs in the AB type;the decrease of the senses of polysemy mainly occurs in the BA type.In terms of factors affecting the results of word meanings,there are two reasons for the increase of polysemy semantic items.One is to use old words to express new concepts and give new meanings to old words;the other is to use unconventional combination structures to bring about the solidification of temporary contextual meaning.The reason for the decrease of polysemy semantic items is mainly due to the abandonment of infrequent meanings by language users under the language economy principle.The main shortcoming of this thesis is that only 130 works of 13 representative writers during the "May Fourth" period are selected,which may lead to the omission of some synonymous words with same morphemes but different order in this period to a certain extent.Future research will further expand the corpus,which may lead to more discoveries.