A Study Of The Lexicalization Of Past Participles In OALD-8 From The Perspective Of Language As A CAS

Lexicalization has been an eye-caching issue and a hard nut for language researchers. In recent years' linguistic research at home and abroad, the existing studies of lexicalization focus on the definition, classification and conditions of lexicalization together with the relationship between lexicalization and grammaticalization. However, the drawback is short of the investigation based on corpus. And no one has conducted a research from the perspective of dictionaries. As to past participles, many scholars take it granted that they are inflectional forms of verbs without lexical status. In addition, researches on past participles mainly pay attention to word class categorization. These researches all expound the nature and evolutionary process of V-ed forms. However, there still exist some shortcomings. First of all, the majority of these researches just focus on the regular forms of past participles, which leave out the irregular forms; secondly, most of these studies analyze the V-ed forms from the static perspective without a panorama discussion. So they neglect the dynamic change of words form idiolect to communal language level and the interaction among language users, culture and the society; thirdly, recent studies of past participles and word class are limited to adjectives. Nevertheless, the result of past participles' lexicalization does not just involve adjectives; fourthly, those researches just focus on lexicalization of V-ed forms, which leaves out the irregular forms of past participles. This problem has made those researches uncomprehensive; at last, researches on past participles are short of the perspectives of lexicography and corpus linguistics.In this thesis, we take the theory of Language as a Complex Adaptive System as the theoretical foundation, on the basis of two main representative corpora-COCA, COHA and Online Etymology Dictionary, together with lexicographical view, to examine the representation of past participles in OALD-8 and carry on qualitative research. This thesis pays attention to the combination of quantitative research and qualitative research, in order to make a qualitative analysis and judgment based on the quantitative study. The result of the research has led to following conclusions: firstly, some of past participles have obtained independent lexical status and been recorded in dictionaries, which has overturned the traditional point of view that past participles are just inflectional forms of verbs rather than words; secondly, the research on word-hood obtaining of past participles has demonstrated that retrieving usage pattern in corpora is a crucial way to judge whether a new word has lexicalized; thirdly, the lexicalization is closely related to the culture and the society. The theory of Complex Adaptive System is a newly emergent theory perspective and no domestic or abroad scholars have used it to explain the process of lexicalization. In addition, it is persuasive to take the past participles recorded in modern English dictionary as material to do the research. At the same time, this research has also provided theoretical foundation for compilation of Chinese dictionaries or Chinese foreign language dictionaries. Therefore, this research owns important academic value and application value.