Grammatical Metaphor And The Treatment Of Medicine-Related Entries In The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (6th Ed.)

The parts of speech (POS for short) studies have long been a hot and difficultproblem of Chinese research. As Chinese POS studies have advanced, POS tagging,especially for a particular subject, began to attract attention from the linguisticcommunity. However, current researches on medical entries in Chinese dictionary arestill blank, and there is no more analysis under the condition of corpus annotationsupport. Regular self-designation usages from Chinese verbs and adjectives are notreadily recognized as independent senses by many Chinese grammarians andlexicographers alike, who have long abided by the so-called principles of “no changein word meaning, no change in part of speech” and “fewest possible lexemes withmore than one part of speech”.In this paper, from the perspective of grammatical metaphor,166medicine-related words have been screened out from the Contemporary ChineseDictionary the6thedition (CCD6for short) to study its annotation status, and theyhave been compared with POS tagging of the words in CCD5from a comparativediachronic angle. What’s more, based on the Contemporary Chinese Corpus atPeking University, Chinese National Corpus and cctv.com, the usage patterns ofmedicine-related words in Chinese dictionaries will be under detailed investigationand analysis.The study has found that there are inconsistencies in part of speech tagging, andmost of them are labeled as a single verb but not multi-category words, thediachronic and synchronic comparative analysis further verify the processingproblem of medicine-related words. According to the theory of grammaticalmetaphor (GM for short), many of these medicine words have been recategorized inthe dynamic process of categorization. Hence, they are supposed to be clearlyindicating its attribute of compatibility. The compilation of Chinese dictionariesshould be based on the investigation of corpus usage patterns to establish the self-designated entries.This paper can not only shed some light on Chinese and Chinese-Englishdictionary compilation by empirical research, but can also help to deepen the studyof modern Chinese grammar. Meanwhile, it has a modest reference value on the nextedition of CCD.