A Study On The Relationship Between Grammatical Relations And Semantic Relations Of Chinese Compounds

In the study of Chinese compounds, the subject of meaning has been drawing a lot of attention. Traditional study on compounds has always been focused on grammatical relations but with little attention to semantic relations within the compounds. Grammatical structure analysis cannot take the place of semantic analysis, for grammatical structure analysis alone is unable to explain the devious and complex semantic relations among compounds. Taking"N+N"disyllabic compounds of modification structure as an example, this paper tries to depict the semantic relations between the two morphemes N1 and N2, probe into the relationship between grammatical relations and semantic relations in Chinese compounds study, and explain the reasons from cognitive perspective through both qualitative and quantitative study.The paper is divided into five parts.Part one is Introduction. The origin and significance of the subject under discussion as well as the previous study in this field are introduced. The previous study tended to analyze compounds by employing syntactical rules, or tried to find some new semantic categories, but with little attention to semantic relations, which showed its inefficiency in revealing the complex meanings.Part two gives a detailed description of the semantic relations between the two morphemes by taking"N+N"disyllabic compounds of modification structure as an example. The main categories are further divided into subcategories, and combinatorial models of the semantic relations between the two morphemes are also offered. From the description we can see the complex and various semantic relations within compounds.Part three discusses about the relationship between grammatical relations and the meanings of compounds. By observing how grammatical analysis can reveal the meanings, we find that some compounds'meanings can be known directly by simply analyzing the grammatical relations while others cannot due to the devious phenomenon formed by two morphemes when revealing the meanings. Hence, we come to the conclusion that grammatical relation analysis alone is not able to explain the devious and complex semantic relations among compounds. What we should do is try to analyze the semantic meanings by combining the two ways together.Part four probes into the relationship between grammatical relations and semantic relations from theoretical and cognitive perspective. Based on the former study, we conclude that the relationship between the two is complementary and dialectical. By applying categorization and prototype theory, we try to explain why there exists such kind of relationship, and find that there is a continuum of relativity between the meaning of morphemes and the meaning of compounds. From the prototypical members of the disyllabic compounds to the non-prototypical members, the relativity shows a downward tendency while the degree of indirectness goes upward.Part five is Conclusion. The main viewpoints and the highlights as well as the limits of the paper are presented. From our study, we conclude that the analysis of grammatical relations alone is too weak to reveal the complicated and flexural meanings of Chinese compounds. The relationship between grammatical relations and semantic relations is complementary and dialectical. What's more, we try to explain the existence of this kind of relationship by using categorization and prototype theory from cognitive perspective. The limits of the paper lie in the fact that the theoretical level is still to be raised and there is still big room for further research related to this area.