The Study On The Morphological Features And Asymmetry Of Chinese Words With Sexual Morphemes "Nan/N(u|")"

When a child was born, someone would ask his parents "a boy or a girl", so it is visibly that the gender distinction of people is very import. "nan"," nu" are commonly used in Chinese to distinct people's gender, which have a high frequency of occurrence whether in our daily communication or in literary works. They both can occur alone, but also can occur in the form of words and their positions in the words they built are also more flexible. Words including "nan"," nu" appeared generally in articles and daily communication. However, according to our statistical results in the corpus, with "nan"," nu" as morpheme words also showed asymmetric distribution, which including a wide range of form, semantic and distribution asymmetry. This paper attempts to use the mark theory, study the morphological features and asymmetry of Chinese words with sexual morphemes "nan/nu". This study is based on two dimensional perspective of cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics, detailed described its form, semantic, distribute situation with regard asymmetry, and analysis the causes of these asymmetries.This paper includes the following four main parts:Part I:It is the introduction of the paper. I mainly introduce the contents, the significances, current situation and the research methods of this paper.Part II:I mainly study the words with "nan/nu" as morpheme, including their semantic change, the characteristics of their word formation,the position of gender morpheme in the words of its constitution, as well as grammatical features of these words. The position of morpheme "nan/nu" in the words they constituted is flexible, they can in front of or behind the entire words. The former tag-style "nan/nu X" may modify most of the noun which can be distinguished with gender. In the latter tag-style "X nan/nu" type, the "X" can be a noun, a adjective, a verb and so on. Whether former tag-style "nan/nu X", or the latter tag-style "X nan/nu", they all emerged in gender asymmetry.Part III:I mainly study the asymmetric structures of "nan/nu" words including the form, semantic and distribution asymmetry. In the form, gender mark can presence or absence depends on the words refer to male or female, such as the words "strong-man " mainly refer to male, when it refer to female it should be change to "strong-woman". In such situation, "strong-man" is the unmarked form, and "strong-woman" is the marked form. Semantic asymmetry including the amount asymmetry of the "nan/nu" words, the specific meanings of different gender morphemes in different phenomena, as well as asymmetry of semantic color. Distribution asymmetric mainly on the distribution range of asymmetry and an asymmetric when rank on "nan/nu" words appear simultaneously. Distribution numerals refer to presence/absence of the use and distribution of the labeled item, the unmarked form appeared much more frequently than marked form. Such as "doctor" appeared more frequently than the type of gender-marked "female doctor" and "male doctor." Distribution asymmetric also performance for when "nan/n u" morpheme appear at the same time, the order always are "nan" in the front "nu "behind, such as "men and women", "farming men and weave women "and so on.Part ?:Based on the former research and analysis, I mainly revealing the causes for these asymmetries. The causes can be divided into two aspects, they are internal and external causes of language. The internal cause of the language is related to the economic character of language itself. The external causes including cognitive factors, physiological factors and socio-cultural factors.