A Study On The Grammatical Labeling And Definitions Of The Chinese Particles In A Primary Chinese-english Pedagogical Dictionary

This study regards words,stems and affixes as entry heads of a dictionary.In terms of parts-of-speech(POS)labeling and definitions,current Chinese-English dictionaries have room for improvement mainly in three respects:(1)most dictionaries do not systematically distinguish between modern Chinese words,bound stems and affixes;(2)words with totally different syntactic functions are sometimes given the same POS label;(3)the definitions of the entry heads and the examples provided for them often do not match one another.The main cause of the former two problems is a lack of rigorous definitions of the relevant linguistic units,while that of the latter one is insufficient contrastive studies of Chinese-English lexical meanings.As the sub-project of "A Study on a New Primary Chinese-English Pedagogical Dictionary Based on Theories of Philology,Grammar and Linguistics",which is a major project from a key research institute of humanities and social sciences supported by the Ministry of Education of China,the study focuses on the grammatical labeling and definitions of the pointing words and the particles.In this study,words are morphemes which can independently function as one of the following three syntactic elements:(1)a single-word sentence;(2)a clause element or its center,determiner,or modifier;(3)a connector of two or more linguistic items or an introducer of another linguistic item.Those morphemes that cannot independently do so are either bound stems or affixes.The study defines pointing words as words that have indexical or substitutive functions,particles as words or affixes which function as the subjective or the connective elements without being substituted by pointing words.The subjective words are mainly subjective verbs,subjective adverbs,and interjections,while the connective words are conjunctions and adpositions.Affixes are prosodic affixes,lexical affixes,phrasal affixes and clausal affixes.This study concentrates on the POS labeling and definitions of the 72 pointing words and 409 particles(333 function words and 76 affixes)among the 1,141 basic Chinese characters identified by Liu Min(2015).Among the particles,it has identified 55 subjective verbs,128 subjective adverbs,3 interjections,44 conjunctions,103 ad-positions,12 prosodic affixes,18 derivational affixes,6 inflectional affixes,33 phrasal affixes,and 7 clausal affixes.About 80%of the function words have English counterparts,while the affixes have less than 30%of English counterparts.