The Polysemantic Category-Deep & Shallow And The Arrangement Of Them In Chinese Teaching Materials

In Chinese, polysemantic category is a common phenomenon. Most Chinese characters have many meanings. To study the relationship and the development rules of these polysemantic categories'cognitive semantics is very important to the lexical arrangement in editing Chinese teaching materials and the development of Teaching Chinese as A Foreign Language. In this paper, we take"deep"and"shallow"as an example, investigate and analyze them thoroughly from synchronic and diachronic linguistics, and summarize the cognitive semantic development rule of polysemantic categories-"deep"and"shallow", then we analyze the reason of asymmetrical phenomena between"deep"and"shallow"from the cognitive linguistics aspect, then we inspect the arrangement situation of them in some Chinese teaching materials which are for foreigners and put forward our own proposal- that when arranging the polysemantic categories we should consider the relationships among different meanings and apply the research of cognitive linguistics to the Chinese teaching materials.Besides the Preface and Conclusions, this paper includes four parts:In Chapter One, we mainly describe the syntactic and semantic property of"deep"and"shallow", and analyze them. We summarize several basic meanings by investigating the meanings of"deep"and"shallow"in dictionaries of modern Chinese and Old Chinese, and find that both"deep"and"shallow"can be attribute, predication, adverbial modifier and complement by investigating the synchronic syntactic position of them.In Chapter Two, we mainly investigate the semantic development of"deep"and"shallow", and find that the production of each meaning has some cognitive rules. We have determined the central significance and two semantic development ways (linear and radiating) of"deep"and"shallow", and have made the detailed explanation from the cognition aspect.In Chapter Three, we investigate the asymmetrical phenomena of"deep"and"shallow"from the frequency, syntactic position and semantic aspect and explain them from the cognitive aspect. We think that the main reason of the asymmetry is that"deep"is the markedlessness while"shallow"is the markedness, which is because of the semantic asymmetry of them.In Chapter Four, firstly, we have investigated the arrangement of"deep"and"shallow"in some typical Chinese teaching materials for foreigners, then we propose our suggestion about the arrangement order of"deep"and"shallow"s different meanings in the teaching materials by considering the research results; in Chapter two of this paper. And then we suggest that when arranging the polysemantic categories in editing Chinese teaching materials, we should consider the cognitive rules of the language learners, the research results of cognitive linguistics and some experience of those excellent foreign language teaching materials.