The Study Of Two-syllable Verb-object Structure Compound Words In Contemporary Chinese

This article is an exhaustive and quantitative research on the two-syllable verb-object structure compound words in "The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary" 5th edi-tion, which is mainly focused on the semantics aspects. The main part of this article is divided into five chapters, and we discussed respectively in them the verbal mor-phemes, the profile of two-syllable verb-object structure compound words, the word formation ability of verbal morphemes, the phenomenon of plural structure words, the features of non-verbal meanings, the producing methods and relationship between the meanings of polysemous words, and other issues.Verbal morpheme is the core and also the entry point of verb-object structure compound word. The conceptual meaning is the standard for determining grammar classes of morphemes. Verbal morphemes are the morphemes which mean action, behavior, existence, change, and willingness. If a morpheme has at least one verbal morpheme meaning, then it is verbal morpheme. But the verbal morphemes whose basic meanings are verbal morpheme meanings are more typical than the verbal mor-phemes whose basic meanings are nominal morpheme meanings or adjective mor-pheme meanings. Verbal morphemes have significant features in conceptual meaning, coloring meaning and grammar meaning, incompleteness in meaning is an important semantic feature of verbal morphemes. We list the 1799 main verbal morphemes of modern Chinese in AppendixⅠ.Verb-object structure is one of the five types of basic word structures in Mod-ern Chinese. Verb-object structure compound words are the words with verb-object structure. Verb-object structure compound words are derived from the lexicaliza-tion of the verb-object structure phrases and the coinage activities which follow the verb-object structure model. We use interpretation structure to determine verb-object structure compound words. Two-syllable verb-object structure compound words have four types of sub-grammatical structures, but their ratios are not balanced. The word formation abilities of verbal morphemes are polarised. Many factors affect the word formation abilities of verbal morphemes. We list 6147 two-syllable verb-object struc-ture compound words in "The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary" 5th edition, in Ap-pendixⅡ.A compound word has the nature of plural structure, only if it has more than one internal grammatical structures in different meanings. The words with plural struc-ture nature are plural structure words. The non-symmetry between surface structure and deep structure and the polysemous nature of morphemes are the two basic causes for plural structure word phenomenon. There are 232 plural structure words in the 6147 two-syllable verb-object structure compound words. Most of them are caused by the first cause, and also most of them have verb-object structure and modifier-center structure at the same time. There are some kind of relationships between the mean-ings of different structures, but they can not be explained by the traditional theory of polysemous word.There are 7292 meanings in the 6147 two-syllable verb-object structure com-pound words, among them, there are 6668 verbal meanings and 625 non-verbal mean-ings. Normally, the meanings of verb-object structure compound words show verbal nature, and it is kind of special when they show other natures. Nominal meanings tend to be people, tools, and time. Nominal meanings come from transformation in reference. For adjective meanings, there are significant features in the word families which contain the morphemes with the meanings of parts of body. Most of the adver-bial meanings are in the modal class and time class. In general, the verbal meanings are stronger in combination nature, and non-verbal meanings are stronger in integra-tion nature. Verbal meanings tend to derive verbal meanings and tend not to derive non-verbal meanings, the span in meanings gives significant influence to this.84.11% of the two-syllable verb-object structure compound words only have one meaning, and polysemous words only take 15.89%. This means, the polysemous ten-dency of two-syllable verb-object structure compound words is not significant. Tradi- tionally, the meanings of polysemous words are derived in the methods of extension, metaphor, metonymy, and special reference. But there are still other methods. Social variations(registers), regional variations(dialects), and era variations of language may produce new meanings; different understanding of the internal structure of words and the polysemous nature of morphemes may also produce new meanings. Many ques-tions remains for us to explore, we can not discuss all of them. In the last part of the article, we list them for future studies.