The Grammatical Classification And Labelling Of The Chinese Notional Lexemes In A Primary Chinese-English Pedagogical Dictionary

Most Chinese pedagogical dictionaries published in recent years have word-class labels for lexical words,but on the one hand,a large amount of entries are not labelled or not matter-of-factly labelled,on the other hand,the labelling systems of these dictionaries are not consistently devised,and thus words with the same syntactic functions are sometimes given different labels.The labelling deficiencies in dictionaries reflect the predicaments that Chinese word-class research are confronted with.Chinese linguists always regard Chinese characters or expressions as equivalents of words in English.However,though English functional words are roughly correspondent to their counterparts in Chinese,lexical words are essentially different.Lexical words in English are originally classified by their inflections,which,in essence,reflected the syntactic functions of general words rather than the distribution of individual words.Without systematic inflectional morphemes to refer to as in English,it's difficult to extract the functions of Chinese lexical words.Thus it becomes a big headache to deal with these words.This paper distinguishes lexeme,the smallest morphological unit,and word,the smallest morphological unit that can serve a certain syntactic function alone.Those who cannot do so are bound stem and affix.This paper postulates that the syntactic functions of general words are needed for lexical words classification,while the distributions that directly reflected the syntactic functions of general words are needed for recognition of lexical word classes.Based on the analyses above,this paper works out the definitions and testing formulas of lexical word classes:Verbs are words that serve the function of predication and enter the slot V in "N bu/mei V";Nouns are words that serve the function of denotation and thus can enter the slot N in "This is N" but cannot enter the slot X in "N bu/mei N";Adjectives are words that modify nouns and thus can only serve the role A in "AN",and can enter the slot X in "A N is also a(zhong/lei/ge)N";Determiners are words that qualify nouns and thus can only serve the role D in "XD",and cannot enter the slot D in "DN is also a(zhong/lei/ge)N";Adverbs are words that are added to verbs or clauses and thus would not lead to ungrammaticality if omitted from both positive and negative clauses.Based on the definitions above,this paper establishes a labelling system and relables some typical lexical words as an exemplification of this new labelling system.