Semantic Analysis On Body Compounds

Body compounds means compounds that have morphemes of body part, which are essential and central words of human language. Man getting to know the world is a process of drawing analogy between things familiar and unfamiliar. As body morpheme is so much used to indicate other things, they have extended many meanings and composed a large number of compounds, In Contemporary Chinese, compounds are in the majority of Chinese words. So in this dissertation, we aim to make a careful and full description of the semantic structure of body compound and meaning extending of body morpheme, and try to discover some interesting rules in it. This dissertation is composed of three parts.The first part, Chapter one Introduction, briefly introduces the current research on body compounds and demonstrates objectives, approaches, perspectives of this dissertation.The second part contains Chapter Two, Three, Four and Chapter Five, which respectively and fully discusses the semantic structure and meaning extending of four main types of compounds.The last part, Chapter Six, briefly introduces the theory on metaphor and metonymy, and generalizies metaphor and metonymy in compounds into two points. First, Metaphor in body compounds can be divided into two types, the one is to make analogy betweent body part and concrete things, and the onther is to use body part to express abstract concept. Second, metonymy in body compounds has several categories:body part indicates person; body part indicates appearance and manner; body part shows character and mood; attribute indicates things that have the attribute; substitution among elements of action and metonymy used in acronym.