A Comparative Study Of Chinese And English Morphemes

Morpheme is the smallest combination of sound and meaning in language.As an element of creating new vocabulary,it is often affected by vocabulary changes.The morpheme phenomenon discussed in this paper refers to the process in which non morpheme language units in the lexical system evolve into morphemes.Morpheme phenomenon widely appears in daily communication.It is one of the main ways of producing new words,and its way also has certain rules to follow.In the past research,there are few studies that comprehensively analyze the phenomenon of morpheme,and there are few cross language studies on morpheme.This paper mainly makes a comparative study on the morpheme phenomenon between Chinese and English,collects a large number of language facts from corpus,network,dictionary and other tools as much as possible,shows the dynamic development process of Chinese and English morpheme,studies the commonness and individuality of Chinese and English morpheme,and explores the motivation of morpheme.On the basis of previous studies,this paper defines morphemeization as a process in which a non morpheme language unit is given morpheme qualification in daily communication and becomes a combination of sound and meaning that can form words,and puts forward the criteria for judging morphemeization.According to the way of morpheme,its types are subdivided into word morpheme and syllable morpheme,and the definitions of the above types are combed and summarized.Starting from the definition of morpheme,this paper investigates the types of morpheme in Chinese and analyzes different types.Through diachronic comparison,we believe that the morpheme of Chinese monosyllabic words has experienced the process of "monosyllabic words-semantic generalization / semantic solidification-reduction of independence-word formation morpheme".According to the uniqueness of Chinese,syllable morpheme is subdivided into continuous word syllable morpheme,foreign word syllable morpheme,letter syllable morpheme and number syllable morpheme.After analyzing the morphemes commonly used in daily pragmatic communication,we believe that the morphemeization of Chinese syllables has experienced the process of "meaningless syllables-giving meaning-obtaining morpheme qualification-word forming morphemes".In the process of exploring English morpheme,we take Oxford Advanced English Chinese dictionary as the basic material and the corpus circulated on the Internet as a supplement,sort out these morpheme words and syllables into tables,and try to intuitively show the characteristics of English morpheme in the form of tables.Through the investigation of the phenomenon of English morpheme,we believe that the simple morpheme of English has experienced the process of "pure word-quasi affix morpheme-word formation morpheme",and the syllable morpheme of English has experienced the process of "pure word-syllable precipitation-meaning giving-word formation morpheme".On this basis,it further discusses the similarities in the formation methods and results of Chinese and English morpheme,and analyzes the differences between Chinese and English morpheme in type refinement,morpheme process and foreign word morpheme.Finally,explores the motivation of morpheme from three aspects: linguistic factors,social factors and psychological factors.As one of the few papers on cross language morpheme research,I hope this research can enrich the morpheme corpus as much as possible and enable more scholars to broaden their horizons to different language environments.At the same time,I also hope that morpheme research can bring some reference value to international language education.