The Research On Semantic Changes Based On The Great Chinese Dictionary

The evolution of the Chinese is one of the indispensable parts of the research on the history of the Chinese language, which contains the emergence, disappearance of vocabulary and semantic changes. By the statistical method used on the corpus, the number of vocabulary and senses in a certain period can be known. However, for lack of the high-quality and large-scale diachronic corpus, the overall evolutionary process of the Chinese is hard to demonstrate. To solve this problem, we labelled the period of all the words’senses in The Great Chinese Dictionary manually in order to build an electronic database, and then find the appearance, ways and regularities of the semantic changes.Firstly, A diachronic Chinese lexical database is built which covers more than 310,000 words and their 490,000 senses according to The Great Chinese Dictionary, A software is also designed for visual expressions and information search. The database contains the word, its senses, the period the word or sense emerged and disappeared, which is got by their historical periods of over 880,000 example sentences with the supplement of web resources, and other informations about Chinese vocabulary. The software is written by C# language which can rapidly get the information the database has, what’s more, the periods of the word and its senses are all represented visually and we can get the vocabulary appearance of a certain period.Secodly, we probe into the distributions of the number and word length of vocabulary in each historical period including the emerged and disappeared ones. The development history of contemporary words and Pre-Qin words are also expressed by the number and word length. From the above, we achieve the general appearance of the development of Chinese vocabulary, so the research on the history of the Chinese language are verified. We find that the vocabulary from monosyllables to disyllables is one trend in development history, but the predominant position monosyllables have in Pre-Qin Dynasty is compared to the later periods’; the appearance of emerged and disappeared vocabulary keeps the same trend roughly; only a fringe of Pre-Qin vocabulary can be continuely used to Contemporary Era, but the senses of these words are easily changed; a lot prototype of idioms nave appeared in fre-Um Dynasty, they developed in bong Dynasty ana the number increased especially in Contemporary Era. Eventually,20 common words which continuely used from Pre-Oin Dynasty to Contemporary Era are chose for the research of the regularities in semantic changes, which refered to the Frame Semantics and FrameNet, the concepts of HowNet are also used. We try to describe the development of these 20 words by the frame, which means psychologycal model, and then conclude the modes semantic changes. The research shows the defects traditional theories have:lexicological word meaning Expansion, Narrowing and Changing are too broad to describe the phenomenon of semantic changes and the theory on Metaphor and Metonymy can’t explain all the phenomenon of semantic changes. The frame, which is motivated by the original sense of words, constraints semantic changes and influences semantic changes by three aspects:the highlight of frame element; the filler of frame element; the highlight and filler of frame element. The degree of influences can be measured by the distance between new sense and basic frame. In addition, different classes of senses have different mode that semantic changes. Our analysis does good for predicting semantic changes in the future.