A Study On The Differences In The Use Of Non - Typical Compound Words

In three of the Chinese phonetics, vocabulary and grammar system,it should be said that vocabulary system is the most prominent which can highlight a distinct characteristic of the Times. Because of dynasties changed quickly and affected or forced by different development of political, economy and culture which requested by different ruling classes,there are many new words came out and also many old words died out,thus it can be seen that the vocabulary system is changes fastest in the three systems. Today, the meaning-focused compound seems to be bound to the vocabulary system, but first appeared in the exegetical study field. Unlike other types of words which functions lie in ideograms,the original meaning-focused compound’s common usage was complemented sentence openings; it made a sentence’s meaning keeps intact. Then with the Times goes on developing and progressing, there were gradually emerged more and more dizzying things and phenomena,it also greatly speed up the definition and nomenclature of new things,thus indirectly led to the rapid development of the vocabulary system.The most obvious change is, monosyllabic words slowly withdraw from the historical stage, and people tend to choose to use bisyllable words and polysyllabic words which express meanings more clearly. After bisyllable words occupied the important position in the vocabulary system and formed the development superiority, instead, the meaning-focused compound has subsidized. Because of its constitutional features, significance and the limitations of using, the number of meaning-focused compound in modern Chinese vocabulary system is very few, and it tends toward semantic junction and single meaning. Why?The article will make a reasonable explanation and also make a theoretical speculation of its subsequent development.In modern Chinese, Li Jinxi is the first people, who propose the concept of “meaning-focused compound”, he listed many phenomena of meaning-focused compound, and put it from exegetical study areas into the language vocabulary field. In this paper, first, the author is on the basis of previous studies; rearrange the meaning-focused compound, andsupplemented and modified. Second, according to the “prototype category” and other related theories of linguistics, the author divided the meaning-focused compound into two parts: typical and atypical, and ultimately determined the division standard of atypical meaning-focused compound. Third, after sum up the phenomena of large corpora, the author thinks that according to the language economical principle, as long as the words in the Chinese vocabulary system must have its own existence value, so, the differences of atypical meaning-focused compound is the kernel issue of our discussion, in this part, I will use cognition theories and pragmatics theories to discuss the cognitive differences and usage variances, I think the cognitive is the root cause which make the atypical meaning-focused compound appears differences,and this factor also have a significant impact for the atypical meaning-focused compound usage. Forth, many scholars put these words into the scope of morpheme-inversed words, but I don’t think so,in this paper, I will make my point, and illustrate the different between atypical meaning-focused compound and morpheme-inversed words.In this article, all examples are come from 《 Modern Chinese dictionary》 which published by the commercial press, CCL( the corpus retrieval system), 《The ancient Chinese dictionary》 which published by Orient publishing center, and 《The Chinese idioms dictionary》which published by Guangming daily press. Before writing, the author search in these dictionary, and select words like “xiāng hù—hù xiāng”, “dài tì—tìdài”, “dēng pān—pān dēng” and so on, the author treated these words as the research object, and named them as atypical meaning-focused compound. The article altogether is divided into three parts, contains organize and classify the meaning-focused compound system, determine the distinction standard of typical and atypical, find the differences between atypical meaning-focused compound, and analyze...