Language Survey Vocabulary

Wordlists are indispensable to linguistic theory, language teaching, and Chineseinformation processing, etc. Consequently, research on wordlists has been one ofthose important projects that have aroused scholars' great attention. As a tool oflinguistic investigation and the basis of language research, a wordlist of linguisticinvestigation plays an important role in the study of general linguistics and appliedlinguistics.Based on the relevant wordlists of linguistic investigation such as CognateWordlist of Sino-Tibetan(2011), Handbook of Chinese Dialect Vocabulary(1972),Handbook for Lexicon Based Dialect Fieldwork(2006), SIL Comparative AfricanWordlist(2006), etc., this dissertation attempts to build a theoretical system andlexicon classification system of compiling a wordlist of linguistic investigation forChinese language and dialect with the experience of typical wordlists of humancognitive and teaching wordlists such as Swadesh Wordlist, Austronesian BasicVocabulary Database and Basic English850, etc.Diverse theoretical systems, categories, and historical evolutions exist inlinguistic investigation wordlists all over the world. Reviewing its history provides adeeper insight into its further study. By clarifying the concept of linguisticinvestigation wordlist, delimiting its research scope, overviewing current majorachievements at home and abroad, this dissertation points out existing problems anddeficiencies in the present research and holds that much remains to be done.Language is a feature of human beings. The ultimate goal of language research isto understand human beings themselves. Linguistics is a complex internationaldiscipline, closely related to biology, genetics, neuroscience, psychology,anthropology, artificial intelligence, communications science, cognitive science, etc.As a branch of applied linguistics, linguistic investigation belongs to synchronic study,subordinate to descriptive linguistics, with dual features of social sciences and naturalsciences. It is of profound significance to construct the theoretical system of alinguistic investigation wordlist from the perspectives of language universals, human cognition, prototype category, ontology, valence lexical theory, theory about coreword and basic vocabulary, etc.Each language has its own lexical system. As vocabulary is an indispensablefoundation of linguistic investigation, compiling a wordlist is of great necessity to thelinguistic investigation, with its main purpose of providing essential entries forinvestigating certain language or certain dialect vocabulary by investigating,recording, organizing and analyzing the entries so as to gain the outline of certainlanguage's phonetic system, clues of the grammatical categorization of a word, to laya foundation for the semantic study, provide with reference for lexical study, andtherefore promote the research and development of linguistic theory and appliedlinguistics.Problems need to be solved in compiling a wordlist include the classification oflexical system, basic vocabulary, entries of wordlists and items of these entries, aswell as principles and standards of selecting entries. According to the convention inthe linguistic circle, this dissertation classifies the lexical system into core vocabulary,basic vocabulary, general vocabulary and common vocabulary, points out thosecharacteristic words exist in basic vocabulary and delimits vocabulary in theinvestigation wordlist, holding that a "word" is a unit to convey complete meaning,free to be components of a sentence or direct construct of a sentence. It is a basic unit,for cognition, communication and thought, widely acknowledged by a speechcommunity's language sense in the form of entries in the wordlist. Meanwhile, thisdissertation proposes four principles of lexicon selection (core principle, universalprinciple, common principle and high frequency principle) together with ten criteriafor selecting entries, classifies the word items into three ranks (Rank One, Rank Twoand Rank Three), and divides the semantic category of the wordlist into two parts:11categories of first level entry and36categories of second entry on the basis of theachievement of Mr. Jiang Di and other scholars.The compiling wordlist of linguistic investigation in this dissertation is mainlybased on the basic database consisting of10representative wordlists at home andabroad, like Cognate Wordlist of Sino-Tibetan (2011) complied by Mr. Jiang Di. After a careful analysis, filtration, integration and manual intervention, a3-Rank wordlist oflinguistic investigation is formed by a1000-word item list, a2000-word item list anda5000-word item list, supplemented with color illustrations for those substationheadwords to interpret specific human concepts and actions in the first rank wordlist,while images and sentences are made with entries conveying abstract concepts andthose grammatical functional items in order to provide convenience for the field studyof language and improve its accuracy and efficiency.