Diachronic Variation Of Chinese Compound Word Structure

Chinese is an isolating language that lacks morphological changes.Chinese vocabulary is mostly composed of a combination of roots.The structure of the compound word and syntactic are largely coherent.The former study of word-formation is limited on synchromic level.When analyzing from the diachronic perspective,we will find that the internal structure of some words has changed.The dissertation targets at the disyllabic compound word,searches the rules of their structure changes in diachronic development.And try to expain the reasons and mechanism of such a phenomenon.Base on the grammatical relations between roots of a compound word,there are five different types of Chinese compounding word structure.They are coordinate,modifier-head,verb-object,verb-complement and subjet-predicate.This paper based on these words to illustrate how they change from ancient Chinese to modern Chinese.Morphemes in Chinese combined together by their simple form to express rich semantic meanings.Compared with comlex syntactic form,the vocabulary lack the word order,function words and some other grammatical means.So it will lead to understanding diversity of grammatical and semantic relations between two morphemes.Of course,the diversity can be diminished under the contraints of the meaning of the word.However,when the meaning of a morpheme or the word changes,or when people unconsciously ignore or re-understand the meaning,the grammatical relationship within the word may change.Here take "yanse(??)" for instance.When it just become a word,it was a modifier-head compound.With the change of word meaning,"yan(?)" is reinterpreted as the meaning of color.As a result,the structure of this word has been reanalyzed for coordinate compound.Here structure variation mean a word in ancient Chinese belongs ti A word-formatiom,however,the structure changes to B in modern ChineseBy historical and comparative methods,we compared and analyzed the structure of each compound in The Great Chinese Dictionary and Mordern Chinese Dictionary.Through the exhaustive investigation we can summarize the different variation of each kind of compound word.Through statistics,it is found that among the compound words of the five basic grammatical structures,the number of those structure changed is not many,a total of 265 cases.Although such compound words occupy a small proportion of the entire compound word system,this linguistic phenomenon is objective and cannot be ignored,and has certain research value.Among the five word-formations,the structure of coordinate compound words have the most varied types and quantities,modifier-head compounds come second.The structural variation of the verb-object and subject-predicate compound is less.At last,the verb-complement compound appeared comparatively late,so their structure and meaning are relatively stable.In the corpus we have collected,there is only one verb-complement compound word has changed its structure.After the description of such a phenomenon,this paper try to explain the motications and mechanism of this compound structural variation and search the regular.There are two aspects of them.On the hand,it's the development of language itself,such as change in the meaning of a word or morpheme,change in parts of speech and transformation of the form of Chinese character.On the other hand,it's the impact of cognitive behavior,which means people's unconsciously reinterpretation in terms of word meaning,morpheme meaning and semantic meaning between two morphemes.Specifically,they are paradigmatic analogy,grammar analogy and heterogeneous activation and so on.On the basis of the two aspects,we may get different results when we analyze the structure of compound words.The reanalysis of structure is mainly caused by reinterpretation of meaningIn addition to the structural variation of the five basic word-formations,there are some other special change situations.Firstly,some early transliteration words in loan words have been considered as Chinese self-sourced words,no longer be considered as a foreign word.Secondly,when two syntactic components on trans-layered structure evolve into a lexical unit,they are reanalyzed into compound words with internal structure.Thirdly,the structure of some compound words are unique and certain at the beginning of the word formation,but there are some other understanding in modern Chinese.At last,some compound words originally have only one structure and part-of-speech,later developed into two parts of speech(noun and verb)and a new structure.In general,we can discover a variety of change situation when analyzing the structure of words from the diachronic perspective This reaserch further illustrates that,in the vocabulary system,not only the meaning of words has changed,but also their structureThe analysis of compound word structure should be mainly based on meaning,supplemented by form.So meaning plays a crutial role in structural variation.There are several different situations by analyzing the changes of meaning in these lexical materials.First of all,the meaning of the word is unchanged,but the morpheme of the word changed.There are also some words whose meaning has transformed,the moroheme meaning remains the same.At last,the meaning of both word and morpheme have all changed.In each case,the meaning itself or people's understanding of meaning will definitely changeThe object of word formation is vocabulary,in other aspect,word formation is a part of grammar system.So it can be seen as a bridge between the lexical system and the grammatical system.In addition,semantics is the core element of vocabulary research,and it has a non-negligible role in the judgment and variation of structure.In summary,the innovation of this paper is to further reveal the interaction between word meaning and structure,and the interaction between lexical structure and grammar,and try to lead the interaction research between vocabulary system and grammatical system to a deeper level.Besides,the ancient and modern comparative analysis of the structure of words also breaks the limitations of the previous lexical structure research that is always limited to a certain synchronic plane.It also established a link between synchronic and diachronic research.However,due to the large number of compound words and the limitations of the author's knowledge structure,the relevant dictionaries can only be used as objective criteria in the comparative analysis of compound structures.It is difficult to make a detailed description of the specific process of lexicalization of each word and the specific situation of the evolution of the structure in different historical periods.It is still possible to examine the overall law based on the comparison of the two periods.These shortcomings will be improved in future research.