An Empirical Study On The Classification Of Parts Of Speech In English And Chinese

Word classes are the foundation of grammatical studies, yet word class categorization of the so-called “adverbial nouns” in analytic languages like English and Chinese has long been a controversial issue. The notion “adverbial nouns” was first mentioned by Larson in 1985, who argues that there is a class of nouns in English which have the ability to function as adverbial modifiers, unaccompanied by a preposition or any other indicator of adjunct status. In essence, “adverbial noun” is just a temporary name used by transformational-generative grammar in syntactical analysis, and such lexemes are labeled as multi-category lexemes of noun and adverb in most authoritative English dictionaries. The word class categorization of “adverbial nouns” in Chinese syntactic analyses has always been in disputes, and the practice of labeling them as shijianci/fangweici in CCD6 is also debatable. From the perspective of Language as Complex Adaptive System, this thesis discusses the word class labeling of “adverbial nouns” in English and Chinese dictionaries. On the basis of China National Corpus(CNC), Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) and a DIY data of “adverbial nouns”, we studied the word class labeling of 184 “adverbial nouns” in CCD6 and 33 “adverbial nouns” in Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary(8th edition)(OALD8) by employing Two-level Word class Categorization Theory in analytic languages and Theory of Norms and Emploitations, and some case studies were conducted. According to the research, the word class labeling of “adverbial nouns” in OALD8 generally agree with their usages in English language community and naming them as “adverbial nouns” by some scholars is questionable, whereas the word class labeling of “adverbial nouns” in CCD6 goes against their usages in Chinese language community. We believe that most of the so-called “adverbial nouns” in CCD6 are multi-category lexemes of noun & adverb and even other word classes. Based on the relative researches, we conclude that the reasons bringing about the inconsistency between the actual usages of “adverbial nouns” and their word class labeling in CCD6 are the following: 1) false criteria of setting up word classes; 2) the ignorance of procedures of judging word classes and two level word class existence; 3) the misleading of the Principle of Simplicity; 4) the unwillingness of employing corpus-based surveys. The research can not only deepen English and Chinese word class research and is useful to improve word class labeling of Chinese dictionaries, but also has implications for word class studies of all analytic languages.