The Semantics Of Chinese Adjective-noun Compounds

This study aims to explore the mechanisms behind semantic extensions ofColor Term–Noun compounds and metaphoric/metonymic patterns of meaningextensions in the framework of cognitive linguistics.The target data are Chinese compounds composed of basic color terms andnouns. Basic color terms includes白bai (white),黑hei (black),红hong (red),黄huang (yellow),蓝lan (blue), and绿lv (green). After collecting data inModern Chinese Corpus (http://www.cncorpus.org), the author finds that白is themost productive color term in word formation, which is followed by黄,黑,红,绿,and蓝. In addition, the author identifies literal and non-literal compounds throughMetaphor Identification Procedure (MIP). As a result, non-literal compounds aremuch less than literal ones. Conventionally, the non-literal ones can be classified intoendocentric compounds and exocentric compounds, based on whether the meaningof whole compounds is derived from the meanings of components. But in this thesis,the author adopts conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, and conceptualblending to analyze endocentric/exocentric ones in depth.From the view of cognitive linguistics, metaphor or metonymy is no longerfigure of speech, but ability of human minds, which enables people to grasplanguage forms effortlessly. In other words, language forms show how human beingsthink. The differences between metaphor and metonymy lies in that the former one isbased on similarity across domains and the latter one depends on contiguity acrossdomains in an ICM. Additionally, conceptual blending vividly shows how peopleinterpret the compounds. So endocentric compounds are classified to two maingroups: metaphor–based type and metonymy–based type, as well as the exocentriccompounds.In endocentric compounds, the proportion of metaphor–based ones reaches44percent while in exocentric compounds their proportion falls to only5percent. Bycontrast, metonymy–based compounds play a more important role in exocentriccompounds, because when metonymy acts upon compounds, the compounds tend to be exocentric, whose percentage is32.The findings can be concluded as following. The first one is that the formationof semantics of Color Term–Noun compounds depends on the semantics frameevoked by metaphor and metonymy. The second is that generally speaking, thenon-literal data is less than the literal ones. In other words, color terms more oftenrefer to the color related senses. The last but not the least, the metaphor–basedcompounds are more likely to be endocentric and most metonymy–based compoundsare exocentric.This thesis contributes to the semantics study of Adjective–Noun compounds bycognitive analysis of compounds composed of color terms and nouns. Theimplication of those findings is that it is possible to define non–basic color terms inthe context of compounds and to explore the mechanism behind this kind ofcompounds.