Sheng Ming Dynasty Polysyllabic Words Research

The disyllabification is the general trend in the development of Chinese vocabulary, which was particularly prominent in the recent ages. Not only has the number of polysyllabic words growth rapidly, but also its formation pattern has diversified gradually, which laid a foundation for the development of the modern Chinese polysyllabic words."Sheng Ming ZaJu" is a work in the Ming Dynasty, when is an important turning period from the recent Chinese to the modern Chinese, so its language can sensitively refelect the alternation of the new and the old elements. This thesis attemptes to do a fundamental research on the whole history of the Chinese vocabulary.Firstly, we will set up a closed corpus of "Sheng Ming ZaJu", and establish a criterion for the segmention by the judgement of polysyllabic words. Then, we will carry out the word segmentation and word frequency statistic, so as to get an overview of the statistical characteristics of the "Sheng Ming ZaJu" vocabulary.And then taking the attention for the polysyllabic words, according to the structure and form of polysyllabic words of "Sheng Ming ZaJu", we can classify it into two genres: pure polysyllabic and compound polysyllabic word. The pure polysyllabic words can be classified: Lianmian words, reiterative words, onomatopoeia, transliteration loanwords; And the compound polysyllabic word can be classfied: coordinative coumpound, subordinate coumpounds, supplememtal compounds, verb-object compounds, subject-predicate compounds, reduplications, affixations and integrated type. On this basis, we count the the sum of the polysyllabic words in each construction mode and the proportion of the whole polysyllabic words.Subsequently, according to the statistical data, we describe the construction mode of the polysyllabic words from the aspects of semantics, part of speech and word order. This work is tremendous, while it is the enphasis of this research.Finally, summarizing the findings of description to sketch out the characteristics of the " Sheng Ming ZaJu "polysyllabic words: the word formation of the polysyllabic words is rich, but the structure is not stable; The quantity and proportion of all types of the polysyllabic words is non-equilibrium. But in general it is consistent with the trend of disyllabification in Chinese vocabulary.