A Study On The Three-character Words And Phrases In Modern Chinese Dictionary

The three-character words and phrases are an important lexical unit in the modern Chinese, so the study on the three-character words and phrases can help us realize Chinese lexicon completely. This paper investigates the 5642 three-character words and phrases in Modern Chinese Dictionary (2002 s Edition). Based on quantitative study and contrastive analysis, the paper discusses the basic features of the three-character words and phrases from four aspects: the phonetic notation and pinyin spelling, inner difference, grammatical function and semantic features, and it also attempts to compare inner differences in many ways among the four three-character words and phrases (the idiomatic phrase, other fixed phrase, common words and scientific terms). Furthermore, this paper advances some reasonable proposals about the problems on the phonetic notation and pinyin spelling and metalanguage in the three-character words and phrases. At the end of the paper, the author also studies preliminarily the heteromorphy and synonymy in the three-character words and phrases. The study on the three-character words and phrases is on the threshold of the modern Chinese lexicon, and a lot of works, such as dynamic change, paradigmatic sets of lexicon and pragmatic features, want us to make technical researches on it.