The Semantic Evolution Of Facial Features Verbs

Facial features verbs are action verbs that our perception of the world and society, which isclosely linked with our daily life. Facial features verbs in the history of China, where there was agreat change in the semantic, especially those high-frequency words.In this paper, I’ll give a simple description of the facial features verbs, focusing on thesemantic evolution analysis of the eye verbs "look","phase","stare","see","blink"; mouth verbs"eat","say","call","drink"; the ear verbs "listen","sound"; the nose verb "smell" and the verb"taste". And try to investigate the time of new meanings that appeared.This paper argues that there are the following three characteristics in the facial features verbssemantic evolution.Firstly, the complexity of the semantic evolvement is proportional to the using frequency.The higher the frequency of a word using, the semantic change is more abundant.At thebeginning a word often just has one meaning. As the development of society, people’s thought isbecoming more and more abundant, and there are more and more social things,so new things andphenomena need new language ingredient to express, meanwhile, new thought also need newlanguage ingredient to express. On the other hand, people often use the old experience to perceivenew things, materializing the abstract of the things and thought; which belongs to the category ofmetaphor and metonymy. So, certainly we will adopt the approach of new wine in old bottles,that is to say, an old word derived from the new semantics.Secondly, facial features verbs often turn into the psychological verbs.In the investigation, we find a common phenomenon, facial features verbs in the process ofevolution, often can enter the category of psychological verbs. Psychological action is a kind ofpsychological behavior; people are often elusive, howerer, when people observe the psychology,they often judge through the face, or other facial features. These can reflect through some oldsaying, such as "speech is the voice of the heart","the eyes are the window of the soul"and soon.Therefore, psychological action and change are often expressed with facial features verbs. Sothe result is facial features verbs entered slowly mental categories, which can expresspsychological movement and the change.Thirdly, semantic evolution is closely related to the syntax change.Semantic as content, the syntax as form, form are closely linked with the content.Syntax evolution includes two aspects. One is the change of the followed composition, thesecond is the change of the verb itself, and these two aspects supplement each other. The changesof semantic can lead to the change of the syntax, to the opposite, semantic changes can also beverified by the change of syntactic.