A Cognitive Semantic Research Of The Compounds From Shijing

Previous works about the researches of the compounds from Shijing (诗经) are from these perspectives of the explanation, the syntactic structure and the semantic structure and so on, which are pretty good but still have a few flaws that they do not focus on meaning construction and the disappearance of the form and the meaning of the compounds from Shijing (诗经). The thesis plans to supplement these flaws, and through which this thesis plans to get the knowledge structure and the cognitive operations of people in pre-Qin.The thesis has filtrated 583 compounds which come from two authoritative compounds dictionaries of Shijing (诗经) written by Xiang Xi (向熹) and Dong Zhian (董治安) as the research subjects in this research. The compounds can be classified into compound noun, compound verb, compound adjective and compound adverb from the perspective of part of speech; the compounds can be also classified into way of metaphor, way of metonymy, way of mixing metaphor and metonymy, way of direct stating from the perspective of meaning construction. The thesis finds out that the number of the compound nouns from Shijing (诗经) is the most, and the number of the compound verbs is the second, the third one is compound adjective and the least one is compound adverb; metonymy is the most basic and popular profiling way of meaning construction no matter what is in modern Chinese or ancient Chinese; and metaphor, mixing metaphor and metonymy are used little in meaning construction of the compounds from Shijing (诗经)The thesis shows meaning construction of the compounds from Shijing (诗经); the foundations of meaning construction are the knowledge structure and the culture model of human in pre-Qin and the profiling ways of meaning construction of the compounds form Shijing (诗经) are metaphor, metonymy, mixing metaphor and metonymy, the results of meaning construction are meaning shift and meaning transformation, and the thesis finds out that the number of meaning shift is more than the one of meaning transformation, which reflects in that the compounds from Shijing(诗经)are of course vague, but not so vague that many people have no idea of them.The disappearance of the form and the meaning of the compounds from Shijing (诗经) has two modes:the disappearance of both form and meaning, the existence of the form and the disappearance of the concept. The possible causes of the disappearance of the form and the meaning are that the iconicity between the formal structure and the conceptual structure of the compounds is weak and so on from the perspective of linguistic factors; and the causes are the disappearance of objects, the change of the social system and so on from the perspective of non-linguistic factors. The effects of the disappearance of the form and the meaning to modern Chinese are mainly reflected in the continuation of the constructions of compounds, the continuation of the semantic relations between the two components of compounds and the enrichment of the meaning system of linguistic units and so on.