Newly-Invented Words: Talk On The Construction Pattern And Process Of The Attribute-Centered Compound Nouns

The paper consists of five parts, which focus on the attribute-centered compound words, their construction and issues concerning with this process in modern Chinese. It illuminates its points in this way: cognition—grammar—cognition, with the aid of quantitative analysis.First, it talks about the cognitive foundation for the emergence of attribute compound words. We take them as an ideological construction of the Han nationality after they externalize and solidify the new information and they are the result of the Han nationality's realizing and organizing their language symbols on the basis of activity experience. And there are two points to mention in externalizing and solidifying the new information: projecting the"F′"character which represents the essence and traits of the matters and externalizing—solidifying of the character—the entrance of characters to language to form words. There is a definite relationship between the language structure and the human experience structure. That's to say the language structure represents the human experience structure. Thus the character's time order and space order in the cognitive concept and other situation orders in some domains will determine the relative order of two linguistic units.There is indirect relationship between the logical construction of words and the grammatical construction of words. However, the semantic structure serves as the mediator, which is hard to describe. But because of the limitedness of the logical construction and the grammatical construction, we can infer the logical construction through the known grammatical construction. With the aid of quantitative analysis, we think that the strong version of the grammatical structures of attribute-centered compound words are Noun plus Noun, Adjective plus Noun and predication compound. Considering the cognition and grammar, we can know that these three structures are deeply influenced by certain logical constructions. They are Character -representing logical structure→(externalizing)→Noun plus Noun, Character -depicting logical structure→(externalizing)→Adjective plus Noun and Character -hinting logical structure→(externalizing)→predication compound.There are altogether three important steps in building of the newly-invented attribute-centered compound words. First, sifting characters, in which the sifting of the"P"characters is influenced by the thinking mode. Thus it results in three types: representing directly, metaphor and metonymy. And generally"F′"characters emerge from three experience domains which are familiar to people: naming objects domain, action domain and situation domain. There exists great contingency in the emergence of"P"characters and"F′"characters. Second, choosing the logical structures for morphemes'entering words according...