Research On The New Sememes Of Words In Contemporary Chinese Vocabulary

New Sememe refers to the new stable sememes adding to the words based on theoriginal meaning. Since Reform and Opening up, a lot of sememes of words have appeared incontemporary Chinese. The new sememes of words that the paper discusses are of stable stateand have polysemic relationships with their original meanings. Through the comparison andcontrast between Modern Chinese Dictionary,1983edition,1996edition and the5th edition,the writer of this paper has collected762new semantic meanings, and establishes threedatabases of new sememes. This thesis has six chapters.In the first chapter the author introduces the research status quo on this topic, definessome concepts, and describes the instructional theories and study methods of the thesis.In Chapter two, the quantitative study was used on the new sememes of words in whichthere is regularity in syllable distribution, structure and vocabulary types. Most words aretwo-syllabic. There are a few polysyllabic words. The structure type is mainly compoundwords and rarely simple words. Most of the compound words are "attributive+core"structure. Based on the source of vocabulary, the writer divided the words into twoparts--common words and special words. The special words include industry words, foreignwords and dialect words. There are more common words than special words.In chapter three, the quantitative study was used on the new sememes of words. All ofthem are investigated from three aspects: concept meaning, color meaning and grammaticalmeaning. The measurement of those three meanings shows the quantitative characteristics ofthe contemporary new sememes. Lexical meaning is divided into different categories: newsemantic meanings referring to new things, new semantic meanings referring to old things,new semantic meanings referring to industry things, new semantic meanings referring tocommon things and new semantic meanings from dialect and foreign words. Contemporarynew sememes mainly refers to old things, most refers to common things, and the dialect andforeign new meanings partly borrowed from the regional dialect words and theforeignlanguage words. In color meaning, the writer put forward two colormeanings--industrial meaning and style meaning and finally summarized the characteristics of contemporary new meaning in color meaning. The color meanings of new sememes arerich. There are emotional, stylistic, image, industry, foreign, local, era and style meanings.Apart from the local, industry and style color meaning, the other five often overlap with eachother. There are amazing numbers of image color meaning, many industry color meaning andstyle color meaning, but small number of emotional and stylistic color meaning. There is asmall number of era color meaning. The proportion of foreign and local meaning is not high,but worth paying attention to. In grammatical meaning, notional words accounts for the vastmajority in words. The number in nouns and verbs is basically the same. The two categorieswas significantly higher in the number than those of the adjectives. The function words onlyhave two categories—the prepositions and the modal words.Chapter four discusses the relationship between the new semantic meanings and theiroriginal meanings in the field of concept meaning. Learning from the research results of theother scholars, the writer puts forward the cognitive model of relationships between differentthings and the pattern named Relational Schema Of Sememes. There are fiverelationships between different sememes, and they are inclusion relationship, correlationrelationship, nearness relationship, similarity relationship and multivariate correlation. Fromthe comprehensive study of the relationship between old and new meanings in thecontemporary Chinese, statistics showed that: there are a few multivariate correlations, andthe number in nearness and similarity relationship is higher than the inclusion andcorrelation relationship. The writer selects the part of words from ancient Chinese andneoteric Chinese and modern Chinese cases to verify the explanatory power of the sememesrelationship patterns on Chinese.Chapter five discusses the relationship between the new semantic meanings andtheir original meanings in the fields of color meaning and grammatical meaning. Thecolor meaning often changes with the appearance of new concept meaning and thechanges includethree types: changing color, adding color and losing color. Most of the newsemantic meanings have the same grammatical meaning with their original meanings. At the same time, the thesis finds variation law of the grammatical meanings. The writer pointsout that color meaning and grammatical meaning often vary with concept meaning.In chapter six, from the pragmatic point of view the writer discusses the process of thenew semantic meanings in the production, construal, spreading and the stereotype. Referringto the theories of semantics and cognitive linguistics, the writer puts forward a new theorynamed Extended Meaning in Abnormal Collocation of Words. This chapter explores andanalyses mechanisms in the process of extended meaning in Abnormal Collocation of Words,linguistic causes, cognitive causes and social causes.There are four innovations in the dissertation. The first is that the author has anall-around and systematic analysis and description of the new semantic meanings of wordsfrom three aspects: concept meaning, connotative meaning and grammatical meaning. Thesecond is that the thesis puts forward a cognitive model of relationships between differentthings and a pattern named Relational Schema Of Sememes. The third is that the writerabsorbing the related theory of pragmatics, semantics and cognitive linguistics puts forwarda new theory named Extended Meaning in Abnormal Collocation of Words, and makes anexploration in mechanisms in the process.