The Semantic Structure Of Chinese Compound Words And The Hint Mechanism Of Morpheme's Meaning

This thesis, falling into five parts, makes a research on the semantic structure of Modern Chinese compound words, and mainly demonstrates the hint mechanism of the morpheme's meaning to the word's meaning, taking character-category disyllabic nouns as a representative studying object. Some theories of cognitive psychology and modern semantics have been used in this paper.The views on syntactic construction have been applied to the analysis of word-formation for a long time, and the relation between morphemes has been thought to be a syntactic one. In the past few years, some scholars put forward new points of view that there is not syntactic construction, but lexical, semantic structure in compound words. The function of the morpheme's m~aning in a compound word lies in hinting the word's possible meaning. Hint is a key concept to the solving of compound words'semantic structure, while words'semantic structure is essential to the research on hint problems.From the viewpoint of the relation between the morpheme's meaning and the word's meaning, it is connotaUve structure that exists in compound words. While we observe the relation between two morphemes in a word, we find it complex and various. The word's meaning often shows a prototype scene, with a few roles and features which become explicit part of the word's meaning if they are profiled by morphemes, and implicit part if not. And a blank-existing semantic model, which can generate analogue series of nouns having the same morpheme-relation-type when some roles or features are assigned to its blanks, can be abstracted from the prototype scene.The hint of morpheme's meaning contains two senses, narrow hint and broad hint. A morpheme, before going into a word, is just a single Chinese zi, a motivated linguistic unit, which can be decomposed into a group of semantic components. Therefore, narrow hint means that zi, with its own semantic components, suggests the features loaded by the character part and category part of a noun. Morphemes are often chosen with probability. It is one of the reasons why several names are owed by the same thing and different things share the same name, and why the semantic relation of two morphemes of words appears complex and vanous.Broad hint has to be understood in this way: morphemes'combination indicates some type of semantic structure, and then the word's meaning is hinted by rescmblance-baced words'paradigm generated by the same semantic model. So broad hint have to det~end upon lexical system, especially analogue series from the same model.The views about semantic structure and the morpheme's hint mechanism within character-category disyllabic nouns will be also applicable to the other types of compound words in Modem Chinese.