The Study Of Modern Chinese Relational Nouns

Relational noun is a subclass of nouns families, which shows the relationship among human beings or things in common. The human being is the subject of activities in the world; therefore, relational nouns that indicate relationships among men is very common and widely used term in Chinese, English and other languages. The dissertation focuses on the relational nouns that show the diversity and the complexity of human relationship. From the views of the language ontology, cognitive and cultural horizon, this dissertation analyzes the form presentations of relational nouns in Chinese, and examines the procedure of the development and the usage of relational nouns in modern Chinese both in horizontal and vertical angles to explore the semantic rules. This means that the dissertation analyzes relational nouns from the point of semantics.The dissertation can be divided7chapters. The main chapters are Chapter1,Chapter2, Chapter3and Chapter4.In introduction is mainly about the concept of relational nouns. In which the subject to be research has been confirmed, and the focus and research status of relational nouns are also classified and reviewed, so does the common approaches.Chapter1discusses the definition of relational nouns. As to the term of "relational nouns", this article continues to use the term that Liu Danqing defined and defines it as "the existence of one party on the premise of the existence of the other party" in term of other predecessors’ understanding of relational nouns. The key semantic features of relational nouns are polynomials, dependency and derivation, which functions as a reference as to judging the typicality of relational nouns.From the aspect of the ontology of language, it analyzes the structure type of relational nouns. Most relational nouns show relationships among men, so analyzing the sources of relational nouns from diachronic aspect makes the researching of relational nouns further.Chapter2illustrates the classifications of relational nouns in terms of the aspect of the ontology of language, the structure and the semantics. Because relational noun is a subclass of nouns, nouns structures such as overlap, compound and adjunct can be found in relational nouns. The second subsection of this chapter discusses the semantics classification, which is divided into the monoreference and the doublereference by the numbers of words movement directions. Most relational nouns with monoreference usually are appellation such as daddy, husband and so on; relational nouns with doublereference usually show the relationships such as the marriage, father and son etc. Most relational nouns originated in ancient Chinese, thus it needs to present the doublereference in diachronic and introduce the source and the change of basic relational nouns. Chapter3expounds functions of relational nouns. Relational nouns compose of essential factors of designators, references and relational nouns, which appear indistinctly, will affect the sentence in some degree in the syntactic presentations. The relational nouns with doublereference as marriage have no references in the syntactic presentations. The relational nouns with monoreference and other words will combine into attributive structures. This chapter describes the presentations of relational nouns in the syntax. The function of combination of relational nouns with other words is also the focus of this dissertation. It is observed that there is actual textual change of relational nouns by lots of linguistic data including classical document and news report. Though relational noun is a subclass of nouns, as to combine with numerals and nouns, there are differences from common nouns. The discourse function of relational nouns can be observed only in a large context of situation where the performance of relational nouns in the cognate case is explored. As for discourse anaphora, relational nouns show unique properties.Chapter4explores relational nouns in cognition horizon. Cognition is the pathway that human world develops into civilization step by step. At the same, cognition and language are closely linked to each other, that’s to say, what kind of cognition way there is, there is what kind of lexical representation. Most relational nouns in cognition are associated with metonymy, which corresponds with memory rules. In the processing of memorizing the same matter, it can save storage space in the brain to use the prominent parts to replace non-significant parts. The reference in relational nouns has close relation with the schema or the prototype in cognition horizon because the semantic features of relational nouns are polynomials, dependency and derivation, which are related to the schema or the prototype in cognition.Chapter5probes into relational nouns in cultural horizon. This chapter investigates the cultural features of relational nouns in the view of Chinese traditional culture. The cultural features of doublereference relational nouns are rather obvious, such as the idea of lineage with Chinese characteristics, the view that men are superior to women, the courtesy of respect for seniority are confirmed in doublereference relational nouns. The cultural connotation that monoerfernce relational nouns are involved lies in the classification of appellation. Most relational nouns in classic documents have become basic words in Chinese lexicon, and small parts of relational nouns have vanished with the change of the social shape. This chapter discusses not only the representation of relational nouns in ancient times but also analyzes the representation of relational nouns in modern society, and particularly in such a processing of global informatization the cultural exchange between China and the West affects the traditional appellation in some degree.Chapter6is case study of relational nouns."Huoli/Huoli" is quite common in the southwest dialect and Jianghuai dialect, but the change of "Huoli/Huoli" as affix of relational nouns underwent the process of reanalysis in which noun phrases firstly became a word, and then an affix, and the whole is a process of tightening. This chapter takes the southwest dialect as the example to analyze the representation of affix in dialects.Chapter7is the conclusion. This chapter sums up the core chapters and main ideas in this dissertation, and claims the questions and the directions for further researching in relational nouns. The author wishes that describing and analyzing relational nouns will be the valuable reference for relational nouns as the subcategory of nouns.