Studies On The New Words And Idioms Of Eastern Han Dynasty Based On The Corpus Of "the Great Chinese Dictionary"

The Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220)is the early stage of Middle Chinese,as a connecting link between the preceding and the following. The vocabulary of the Eastern Han Dynasty is a consequence of the development of lexical system and changing times. There had been a lot of disyllabic and polysyllabic words during this period. Compared with the pre Qin and Western Han Dynasty, its vocabulary features are quite distinctive,showing a Chinese trend of polysyllabic words. The paper takes the Eastern Han Dynasty as a synchronic stage and aims to get the whole view of the new words in Eastern Han dynasty through the study of the new words in this period.The paper is divided into the following sections:The first chapter is the preface, introducing current circumstance, significance, content, and methods it takes of the study on words in Eastern Han dynasty.<The Great Chinese Dictionary>has collection of more than 370,000 words, using more than 3000 varieties of literature. With< The Great Chinese Dictionary>, the paper has built the new words corpus of the Eastern Han dynasty, complementing and screening the corpus to ensure its accuracy.Chapter two selects new words embodying the characteristics of the times to form the symbolic word field reflecting the social characteristics of the Eastern Han Dynasty. Comparing the central components and restrictive sememe by the seme analysis of these new words in the field,it put them into different sub-word fields. The new word field embodying the social characteristics of the Eastern Han Dynasty is divided into five sub-word fields, which reflect the political life, the economic life, science and technology, cultural thoughts and social life. The new words field during the Eastern Han Dynasty is a comprehensive one with various internal aggregation, including the relations between hyponymy, synonymy, the whole and parts. In the word field of the same level, there also many types of internal relations, such as synonymy, parataxis and so on. These new words in the field are mostly polysyllabic words. Some of the original monosyllable words expressing old stuff had been recorded by disyllabic and polysyllabic words instead in the Eastern Han Dynasty. The iconic new word field reflects how the change times in the Eastern Han Dynasty and the development of people’s recognition influence these new words.Chapter three is about new monosyllable words in the Eastern Han Dynasty. In the Eastern Han Dynasty, new monosyllable words are the most with a total of 2241, some new monosyllable words recorded new concepts and new stuff at that time, some recorded the old stuff and the old concept. Some new words recorded the old concepts before the Eastern Han Dynasty, but the new words and old words were slightly different in meaning and usage.From the perspective of the morpho-phoneme of new monosyllable words, some recorded new words in old forms of pronunciation, and some recorded in new forms of pronunciation. In the new generation of monosyllabic words, some have homonymous and synonymous relations with some monosyllabic words appeared before the Eastern Han Dynasty.Chapter four and five are about the study of new disyllable words in the Eastern Han Dynasty. The two chapters include the joint disyllable words, modifier-core disyllabic words, complementary disyllable words, verb-object disyllable words, subject-predicate disyllabic words, additive disyllable words, eclipsed disyllable words and disyllable single morpheme words. Of the new disyllable words, compound words account for the largest number; of the compound words, joint disyllable words are the most with a total of 2922, accounting for 43.9% of the total amount of disyllable compound words; followed by modifier-core disyllabic words with a total of 2579, accounting for 38.7% of the total amount of di syllable compound words. At the same time, they analyses internal semantic relations and composition of various types of compound words. Among the additive compound words in the Eastern Han Dynasty, most of the affixes had already formed in the pre Qin period; some had just emerged in the Eastern Han dynasty, such as "头"Chapter six is the research of new polysyllable words during the Eastern Han Dynasty, including the trisyllabic words, four syllable words,and Chinese idioms. Among the trisyllabic words in the Eastern Han Dynasty, nouns account for the largest number, accounting for 90.9% of the total of trisyllabic words. The internal structure of the trisyllabic words is more complex than the disyllable compound words with surface structure differing form deep structure. For quadrisyllabic words, nouns also are the most with 56.6% percent of the total of quadrisyllabic new words.Chapter seven studies the morpheme and morpheme meaning of compound words in Eastern Han Dynasty. Starting from the morpheme of compound words, it divides the morpheme into nominal, verbal, adjective morpheme according to their grammatical natures of the Eastern Han Dynasty. Some are formed by the original meaning and some uses extended meaning.Some changes in word formation, and changes appear by lexical meaning of compound words.Chapter eight studies the formation of lexical meaning of new compound words in the Eastern Han Dynasty. This chapter studies different types and different semantic relations of compound words to investigate conditions of these compound words. The morpheme meaning of compound words form semantic meaning through semantic relations, thus produce lexical meanings of compound words. There are several stages between morpheme meaning and lexical meaning, and each element will lead to morpheme meaning failing to express lexical meaning directly and completely.The last part is conclusion of the paper. This part describes the whole picture of new words in the Eastern Han Dynasty and analyses causes of these new words. The paper has the following innovations:First, the paper takes the Eastern Han Dynasty as a synchronic period, conducts statistics and proportion analysis of new words with different syllables and different types and demonstrates features of these new words in Eastern Han Dynasty.Second, the paper establishes symbolic new word field embodying the characteristics of the Eastern Han Dynasty with the theory of modern semantics and analyses paradigmatic relations between these words with the seme analysis.Third, the paper put emphasis on the analysis of morpheme and morpheme meaning of compound words and investigates the formation of lexical meaning of different compound words in compound word study. For lexical meaning, it analyses the morpheme meaning and discusses the process of the formation. Besides, the changes in different stages are also investigated.