The Investigation Of "Qi Guai"Category Psychological Adjectives In Modern Chinese

The sub-categories of psychological adjectives can be classified by grammar or by semantics. This paper studies a small category of psychological adjectives from semantics. We select a group of psychological adjectives with the same or similar semantic components known as the "Qi Guai" category psychological adjectives. The "Qi Guai" category psychological adjectives contain the most representative semantic component, namely [-understanding]. That is to say, from the stimulus—esponse theory to analyze, the subject (people) under the stimulus of the object produces a kind of confused emotion. Semantic features determine syntactic features which these psychological adjectives often combine with "how" or "why" in sentences. Such usage has unique pragmatic value because it accords with the principle of the economics of language. Without using this expression may cause burden in language communication.In order to analyze the "Qi Guai" category psychological adjectives more in detail, after simple introduction of the theory, this paper selects the typical member "Qi Guai" as a case study. With the help of Chinese corpus, we explore the typical member "Qi Guai" from the perspective of diachronic and synchronic. Then, we compare the typical ones with the atypical ones. We found that there are some common things and also differences between the typical ones and atypical ones. In common, at first, these members can be used in the "ShiDong" structure. Secondly, these members can express the change of emotional state in the means of vocabulary or grammar. Thirdly, these members are often followed by a clause as a reason object. The differences are that, firstly, the performances of the typical member "Qi Guai" are more various than those of the atypical members in syntactic structure. Secondly, the typical member is under development and has the syntactic features of psychological adjectives and commentary adjectives.In addition, the "Qi Guai" category psychological adjectives can express the tense meaning which is not significant as that of the verb. There are two kinds of means to express tense. One is vocabulary method which takes use of some phrases and words to express such as "become""be""more and more". Another one is grammar method which matches these members with "Zhe""Qi Lai".This collocation is related to the semantics of the "Qi Guai" category psychological adjectives. At last, we conclude the value of the study of the sub-categories of psychological adjectives. This kind of study offers some necessary elements to Chinese information processing and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.