Research On Historical Evolvement Of Vocabulary System Of Conceptual Field Of The Chinese Words Signifying"xiyu"

By adopting the combined principle of synchronic and diachronic descriptions,and the combined descriptive means of form and meaning, this paper absorbs relevantresearch achievements in modern linguistics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, etc., andaims to make a study of the conceptual field of words signifying “xiyu”. The paper,whose research basis is building the corpus, explores the distribution of every memberin the conceptual field in the Chinese language from the ancient to contemporarytimes,, describes its historical evolution, and makes a further inquiry of itsevolutionary law.This thesis contains3parts, or6chapters in all. The1st part (the1st chapter)briefly introduces the reason of selecting the topic and the research status, builds acorpus, analyses the researching methods, and states the aim of the paper, that is,describing the conceptual field of words signifying “xiyu” in the Chinese languagefrom the ancient to contemporary times, and thus exploring their historical evolution.The2nd part (2-5chapters) divides the history of the Chinese language into4periods---ancient, mediaeval, modern, and contemporary times. By taking everydynasty as a synchronic horizon, it describes the distribution of every synchronichorizon in the conceptual field. The last part, also the last chapter, is the conclusion ofthe thesis, summarizing both the historical evolution of a certain conceptual member,and the whole system, and further exploring the law of evolution, by analyzing thecorpus.