A Study On Semantic Change Of Chinese Stock Terms

Semantic change is not a new issue for study. As early as 1893, French linguist Breal published his research in his book Semantics. With the development of modern linguistic theories, in recent years, semantic change has become a central issue again in many fields such as semantics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, etc.. Chinese stock terms are the technical terms used in Chinese stock market. With the development of shareholding system and stock market, these terms show a strong tendency of semantic change, which has aroused extensive attention of domestic linguists since the 1990s. The study should be combined with different linguistic theories in order to gain a deep insight into the regularities and motivations for the semantic change of Chinese stock terms.Inspired by the achievements of studies on semantic change, the author still realizes that the previous analyses mainly focus on description of single word's semantic change or classifications of semantic change. As for Chinese stock terms, researchers just take them as a part of new words. Their attention is on description and analysis of morphorlogical structures of the words rather than their semantic change. The awareness of the gap in researches motivates the author to continue the systematic explorations. Chinese stock terms are collected to form a relatively closed corpus in which the regularities and motivations of its semantic change are observed on the basis of quantitative and qualitative analysis. It is expected that this research can produce some enlightening result for the further research.A brief literature review of the previous researches is conducted firstly. The author's study of semantic change is not restricted to traditional descriptions of linguistic forms. Instead, it combines meaning with the comprehension of the cognition mechanisms such as metaphor and metonymy for the purpose of interpreting how meaning experiences change in people's inference. However, since people's cognition is motivated, this research approach is subjective to some degree in explaining semantic change. Therefore, the author makes use of a pair of terms for analyzing semantic components created by施春宏, namely involved semantic component and descriptive semantic component. On the basis of meaning correspondence between semantic components of a word and Chinese characters used to form that word, we make a further classification of semantic components, namely literal meaning, pseudo meaning, extended mening and absent meaning. Then we have four subtypes of involved semantic component: literal/pseudo/extended/absent involved semantic component and four subtypes of descriptive semantic component: literal/ pseudo/extended/absent descriptive semantic component. Inspired by the new analytic method, the author tries to make objective descriptions and interpretations of the terms in corpus.There are 1188 Chinese stock terms selected for the corpus in this research. They are formally described according to different types of semantic components. Some figures are gained through quantitative analysis. Then all the terms are searched in China's biggest searching website Baidu in order to find out texts including these terms. By analyzing whether the terms in these texts are in a stock context, we have picked up nearly fourty terms which experience semantic change and frequently appear in other contexts. Besides, some words only used in stock market change its morphological meaning when being created. The figure is fifty-seven. These ninety-seven terms receive formal description of their changed meaning and are compared with the original ones.Following the comparing work, the author suggests the semantic change process as the change of involved semantic component causes the regulations of descriptive semantic component. The degree of tendency on semantic change decreases when the semantic components are from the extended to the pseudo and the absent and then to the literal. It has to be suggested that accessibility determines this tendency. The semantic change is realized by two cognitive devices, namely metophor and metonymy. Semantic change is an activity that draws on cognitive economy and takes place in permeable fields in order to achieve effective communication. The internal and external factors such as effective communication, cognitive economy and field permeability densely intertwine to cause semantic change of Chinese stock terms.In the dissertation, the author makes attempts to illustrate the regularities and motivations of semantic change of Chinese stock terms with evidence from the relatively closed corpus and explores a solution to the combination of subjective and objective descriptions and interpretations. Further confirmations are expected with a larger corpora as well as more strictly and scentifically collected data to be backed up by more advanced research method.