Polysemantic Categories "Big" And "Small" And Their Arrangement Rules In Editing Chinese Teachingbooks

In modern Chinese, polysemantic category is a common phenomenon. Most of the Chinese characters have a lot of meanings. Studying the relationship and the developing rules of these polysemantic categories' cognitive semantics is very important to arrange in editing Chinese teachingbooks and the development of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language. In this paper, taking "big" and "small" as an example, we analyze and investigate them thoroughly from synchronic and diachronic linguistics, and then summarize the cognitive semantic developing rules of polysemantic categories-"big" and "small".We analyze the reason of asymmetrical phenomena between "big" and "small" from the cognitive linguistics aspect, and inspect the arrangement situation of them in one Chinese teachingbooks which is for foreigners and put forward our own proposals:when arranging the polysemantic categories,we should consider the relationships among different meanings and follow the developing rules of people learning a foreign language.Besides the Conclusions, this paper includes five parts:In Chapter One,we maily interpreter the aim of writing this paper.In Chapter Two, we mainly describe and analyze the syntactic and semantic property of "big" and "small". By investigating the meanings of "big" and "small" in dictionaries of Modern Chinese and Old Chinese,We summarize several basic meanings, and find that both "big" and "small" can be predicative, attribute, adverbial modifier and complement by investigating the synchronic syntactic position of them.In Chapter Three, we mainly investigate the semantic development of "big" and "small", and find that the production of each meaning has some cognitive rules. We have determined the central significance and two semantic development ways (linear and radiating) of "big" and "small", and have made the detailed explanation from the cognition aspect.In Chapter Four, we investigate the asymmetrical phenomena of "big" and "small" from the frequency, syntactic position and semantic aspect and explain them from the cognitive aspect. We think that the main reason of the asymmetry is that "big" is the markedlessness while "small" is the markedness, which is because of the semantic asymmetry of them. In Chapter Five, firstly, we have investigated the arrangement of "big" and "small" in one typical Chinese teachingbooks for foreigners, then we put forward our proposals about the arrangement order of "big" and "small". We suggest that when we arrange the polysemantic categories in editing Chinese teachingbooks, we should consider the cognitive rules of the foreign language learners, the research results of cognitive linguistics and some experiences of those excellent foreign language teachingbooks.