Study On The Visual Behavior Verbs Of Modern Chinese

Visual behavior verbs are a subcategory classified according to their meaning features. They are the main method to give language descriptions to visual behaviors. The research of the Modern Chinese subcategory verbs is now in its initial stage, so there is certain inadequacy in the depth and breadth of the research. This paper does a multi-angle research of the Modern Chinese visual behavior verbs.The significance of the research is as follows: Firstly, it provides us with the diverse attributes of the Modern Chinese visual behavior verbs; Secondly, it provides theoretical and methodological help to the study of other subcategory verbs; Thirdly, it provides the corresponding linguistic support to computational auto-recognition of visual behavior verbs and the Chinese teaching to foreigners.The main contents of this paper are as follows:Chapter 1 is the preface, introducing the relevant current situation, difficulties and significance relating to this research, and in the final part the theoretical basis and research methodology of this paper.Chapter 2 discusses the relation between visual behaviors and visual behavior verbs, showing that these are two closely-related but distinctive conceptions. Their relation is one of the signified and the signifier, with the former making the existence of the latter meaningful. They are not corresponding, but are limited by the characteristics in the words themselves. Different languages give different descriptions to visual behaviors, and even the same language describes them differently because of temporal and spatial divergence. On the basis of an elaborate analysis of their relation and the characteristics of the Modern Chinese vocabulary, this chapter gives a precise definition to visual behavior verbs, and also provides the principles and standards to it.Chapter 3 is mainly composed of three parts: Firstly, the range of the Modern Chinese visual behavior verbs is delimited precisely according to the principles and standards provided by the previous chapter. 210 Modern Chinese visual behavior verbs are within the range, which makes the research controllable. Additionally, it analyses the difference between some non-visual behavior verbs and visual behavior verbs, so it further clarifies the scope of the research objects and at the same time discusses briefly the main features of the objects. Besides, this chapter clarifies the Modern Chinese visual behavior verbs from the aspects of word formation, transitivity and semantic features. It includes the basic meaning features and attached meaning features of relevant verbs through the analysis of semanteme, thus an Information Chart of the Modern Chinese Visual Behavior Verbs' Semantic Attributes is made. It also discusses semantic features from different angles. Thirdly, this chapter analyses the correlation among the static semantic features of the Modern Chinese visual behavior verbs. Through the calculation of the consistence degree among some of the semantic features, this chapter studies their consistence degree. Moreover, their internal relations are revealed through the comparison of the calculation results and people' cognitive intuition. The research shows that the semantic features of visual behavior verbs have both "compatible" and "incompatible" relations, and the relevance degree of these features is not totally identical with our cognitive intuition.Chapter 4 does a closed research on the usage frequency of the 210 Modern Chinese visual behavior verbs, with the help of the self-established Modern Chinese balance corpus and relevant particle retrieval softwares. While the word frequency is being calculated, the focus is not only on how many times a certain verb occurs in the corpus, but also on the frequency of its visual items, non-visual items, visual usages and non-visual usages. These statistics appear on The Frequency Chart of Modern Chinese Visual Behavior Verbs, which makes a full statistical preparation for further researches. Through analyzing the words one by one, a Chart of the Grammatical Functions of Modern Chinese Visual Behavior Verbs is made. This chart is illustrated from the aspects of the semantic features of visual behavior verbs, the features of their grammatical functions and their frequency distribution. The distribution of the grammatical features reveals that the semantic specialness of visual behavior verbs affects their grammatical functions. Compared with general verbs, the semantic specialness of visual behavior verbs lies in their actionness and their emphasis on description of behavioral modes in their meaning. This emphasis is determined by the special role of visual behaviors among all human behaviors. On the basis of the statistics obtained from the previous research and the calculation of correlation coefficients, this chapter makes a comparison and analysis of the relevance degree between the frequency and part of the functions of Modern Chinese visual behavior verbs. What's more, an analysis is also made on the consistence degree of these functions through the calculation of consistence. The result of the analyses shows that the functions and frequency of Modern Chinese visual behavior verbs have a general direct correlation, whereas there is certain difference in their relevance degree. Chapter 5 studies the diachronic changes of Chinese visual behavior verbs. It has the following contents: Firstly, a comparison is made between the visual behavior verbs in Modern Chinese and those in the book Origin of Chinese Characters. This part compares the visual behavior verbs in Modern Chinese and those in the book Origin of Chinese Characters methodologically and analyses their difference in quantity and semantic types. Secondly, it illustrates the changes of Chinese visual behavior verbs. The changes of Chinese visual behavior verbs are mainly the result of the occurrence of new visual elements and the disappearance of the existing visual elements. The former mainly refers to the appearance of new visual behavior verbs, including the appearance of new word forms and the old words' acquiring visual behavior meanings; the latter mainly refers to the disappearance of visual behavior verbs and words' losing their visual behavior meanings. Moreover, it makes a comparison and analysis on the diachronic substitution of core visual behavior verbs. Thirdly, it studies the meaning extension of Chinese visual behavior verbs. The study reveals that metaphor is the main method for Chinese visual behavior verbs to extend their meanings, which can be seen from the transformation of word meanings from their physical visual meanings to psychological visual meanings. The basis for semantic metaphors of visual behavior verbs is the similarity between the visual behaviors and human psychological behaviors, and its co-appearance with behavioral processes. Grammaticalization is an important result of word meaning extension, and it's diverse in Chinese visual behavior verbs. This chapter analyses several verbs with a relatively high degree of grammaticalization. In the respect of their grammaticalization process, these words have transferred from being notional to being functional under the rules of grammaticalization through the relation between visual meanings and other meanings.The concluding part gives a summary of the theories, methodology and conclusions in this paper, and points out the imperfectness in this research.The statistical charts are the main research achievements of this paper. For the sake of space, these charts are not put in the text but in the appendix.