A Research On Temporal Words In Contemporary Chinese

In this paper, temporal words are classified as a distinctive word class in contemporary Chinese lexicon system as same as the nouns, adverbs, etc. Based on the previous achievements made by scholars, using the method of combing the form with meaning, description with interpretation and longitudinal study with synchronic study, then, a study of the criteria of words classification, scope, Word-morpheme and structural types, semantic expression, historical evolution is made. There are four parts in this paper:The chapter one is a brief of temporal words. Based on the previous achievements, a careful study of 83 words which are marked as "time word" in the Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese (5th edition) is made. At the same time, we sum up the internal features of the temporal words in the combination functions, the grammatical functions, and the meanings, analyze the basis and possibilities for the temporal words as a distinctive word class, and explain why we did this. At last, we list 773 temporal words with sound sequences, showing the temporal words as a whole one.Chapter II analyzes the structure of time phases. We study and statistic the main word-morpheme of the temporal words, in which the lexical categories of 17 major word-morphemes were discussed, followed by t the study of structure of the temporal words, we summed up the features of the temporal words in word-morpheme and structure of the type.Chapterâ…¢studies the semantic classification of temporal words. In this chapter, we choose some kinds of characteristic time phases and do a research on the semantic and expression.The fourth chapter is a historical evolution analysis. We select three words---- "past", "current", "afterwards", analyze their history of usage and the reasons of generation and evolution.