Analysis Of Meaning Production Mechanism Of Chinese Word Groups

In Chinese vocabulary, word group refers to a word category which is composed by a headword together with other words collocated with it. The word category is built on the basis of family resemblances. Its members are well-structured words or phrases, which have related meanings. For example, word group"领"(collar): White Collar, Grey Collar, Gold Collar etc. With the development of science and technology and society, more and more words are emerged in the form of word groups. This paper selects Chinese word groups as its researching subject. In the light of lexicology, semantics, social linguistics and cognitive linguistics, this paper carries out a more systematic study on its formation, motivation, and mechanism of meaning formation and its application to the Teaching Chinese Courses for Foreigners.The members in a word group can be words or phrases, among which there is a common morpheme, which is called headword. The headwords in word groups are mainly from basic-level category. For the headword is the mark of a word group, this paper pays great attention to the study of headword with a purpose to have a better understanding of word groups. Traditional study focuses on reasonable allocation, logicality of composition and the logical relation of allocation between word and word, which obviously neglects the role of human played in word formation and its meaning understanding. This paper holds a view that there is closed relationship between the formation of word group and human's cognitive mechanism. Concepts, as human's mental representation of real world, always appear in the form of words. In this sense, the formation of word group can be regarded as the results of integration between concepts. Currently, a large amount of words are emerged in the form of word group in Chinese vocabulary. The motivation of their emergence is closely related to the development of China's economy and fusion of different nation's languages.The meaning of Chinese word group is not from the logical relations between modifiers and the modified, but from the conceptual blending between words. The headword has basic meaning and extended meanings and its meanings are relatively entrenched, dynamic and schematic. In word groups, there are three kinds of semantic networks formed on the foundation of semantic extension of the headword, namely radiation, concatenation and a compound model. Cognitive devices like prototype shift and split, metonymy and metaphor play an important role in the meaning extension of the headword in word group. When a headword integrates with other morphemes, the attributes in their frames can merge with each other by mapping and activation, and then form an emergent structure, which produces the emergent meaning after three interrelated ways, namely, composition, completion and elaboration. This is the cognitive mechanism of meaning production of Chinese word groups.In Chinese word groups, the headword functions as a bridge to connect all members in word group, which makes the meanings of the members in word group much more inferential. In the Teaching Chinese Course for Foreigners, students can quickly remember the words in a word group if they firstly grasp the meanings of the headword. Therefore, there is possibility and feasibility to apply Chinese word group in the Teaching Chinese Course for Foreigners.