Constraint Theory's Explanation Of Chinese Noun-noun Combination

People communicate by combining familiar words in novel ways in order to express new ideas and to refer to new situations. Virtually every sentence that one hears or reads is a novel combination of familiar words. The ability to put words together in novel ways to produce meaningful word combinations is a distinctive feature of language. The process of forming new concepts by integrating two (or more) concepts is called conceptual combination and the result of this process is known by many names, such as combination, combined concept, compound, or complex concept[2], etc. What's more, in cognitive psychology there has been much interest in a particular kind of novel word combination: noun-noun combinations.But how are the meanings of multiword phrases such as "apartment dog", "cactus fish", "stone lion", or "redheaded butcher" produced from the meaning of their constituent words? In terms of cognitive linguistics, meaning depends on categorization: to understand a single word such as "fish" is to be able to correctly classify items in the single category fish; to understand a phrase such as "pet fish" is to be able to classify items in the combined category pet fish. To explain how the meaning of a combination like "pet fish" is produced from its constituent words, we must first explain how people classify items in single concepts like pet and fish and in combined concepts like pet fish. Therefore, at the beginning of the paper, definition of concepts and conceptual combinations are introduced in advance.Furthermore, among many competing theories which attempt to account for noun-noun combinations, the paper takes Costello & Keane's Constraint theory as its starting point. First of all, the paper validates the correctness and universalism of Constraint theory in its applicability in explaining Chinese data and particularly covers abstract nouns into the study to test the effects of Constraint theory. So the second objective of the paper is to explain how noun-noun combinations in which abstract nouns play the role of modifier (abstract N1+N2) can be explained by Constraint theory, and how the semantic features and potential functions of abstract nouns affect N+N interpretations.According to the diagnostic constraint, one of the three constraints proposed in Constraint theory and the semantic features and potential functions of abstract nouns, two predictions are made. In order to test the correctness of the two predictions, the paper designs an experiment and basically proves the correctness of the predictions. Finally, based on the analysis to Chinese novel noun-noun combinations, especially abstract N1+N2, the paper finds some inadequacy to Constraint theory.