A Study On Delexicalization Of "红" In A Dream Of Red Mansions

Delexicalization refers to the linguistic phenomenon in which one word loses part or all of its semantic contents while sharing the meaning of its collocational partners (Wei Naixing, 2007:17). It is a widespread phenomenon and a main tendency for high-frequency words. Many researchers have done studies on delexicalization both abroad and at home, such as Jespersen's theory of light verbs, Cater & McCathy's heavy-duty verbs, Hopper & Traugott's grammaticalization, Sinclair's progressive delexicalization and Shared-meaning mechanism as well as Wei Naixing's studies at home. In all these previous studies, delexicalization has been explained both from theories and pragmatic usages. However, few studies have adapted a coherent text to study this phenomenon. Meanwhile, there are few studies on delexicalization of the color words. Therefore, this thesis studies delexicalization of one color word"红"with a coherent text A Dream of Red Mansions.Chapter one is the introduction part, which tells about research background of this paper, the significance of the study and the organization of the thesis. Chapter two reviews critically the previous studies on delexicalization, such as grammaticalization, Sinclair's shared-meaning mechanism and Wei Naixing's corpus-based studies on delexicalization in both English and Chinese. In chapter three, the author provides the research questions and the instruments used for analyzing the corpus. Then, the research procedure is shown in steps. Lastly, data collection and analysis are provided in details. Chapter four is the main content of this thesis, which shows the results and discussions of the present study. In this chapter, the delexicalized color word"红"is classified and semantic contents and structural patterns of the example words or phrases are discussed with the framework of Sinclair's shared-meaning mechanism. The results indicate that"红"can be classified into three categories: delexicalized adjective, delexicalized verb and delexicalized noun. In all these three categories, the delexicalized word"红"has lost its original semantic content and displayed a strong tendency of delexicalization to varying degrees. When"红"functions as delexicalized adjectives and verbs, its original word class is changed totally while its original semantic meaning is still preserved mostly. However, the delexicalized noun"红"loses most of its original semantic contents. In the fifth chapter, findings of this paper as well as limitations and suggestions of it are provided. With the analyses, it can be concluded that even in a coherent discourse, the tendency of delexicalization still exists."红"as a noun represents the tendency of delexicalization mostly with the ratio of 52.11%, then is"红"as an adjective, with the ratio of 26.34%. Delexicalized verb is furthest from the core of delexicalization, with the ratio of 21.55%. Besides findings of this paper, the author also provides limitations and suggestions of the present thesis in this chapter. Since there is delexicalization phenomenon in color word"红"with a coherent text, there may be delexicalization tendency in other color words and it is worth analyzing in future studies.