Corpus-based Study Of Lexicalization And Grammaticalization

According to the researches on corpus linguistics, semantic prosody, lexicalization and grammaticalization, the study chooses English word bling and Chinese word “Xing”(性) to analyze the changing paths and evolution processes.The study adopts a comprehensive view in which both quantitative and qualitative ideas are taken into consideration. Being the working corpora, COHA, COCA and Internet data are sampled and their tokens are thoroughly inspected and calculated based on collostructional strength. Subsequently, analysis on semantic prosody is unfolded within the collocations respectively. Besides, the changing process or path of each word, as well as the motivation is further discussed.The major findings are listed hereon.(1) The collocations of bling are highly associated with hip-hop music and culture, including shiny, ostentatious clothes and jewelry, thus the semantic prosody of bling is neutral. “Xing”(性), no matter as a separate word or a derivational affix, combines with neutral collocations, so the semantic prosody of “Xing”(性) is mostly neutral.(2) Bling, originally was viewed as an ideophone, or a right-hand constituent, broke out the discipline of grammatical construction gradually and evolved to be a separate word, called lexicalization. “Xing”(性) is a separate word with diverse meanings in ancient Chinese at first. Then it degenerates to a morpheme, or a derivational affix, forming into “X 性” word, that is named grammaticalization.(3) On discussing the motivations of the two processes, internal and external aspects are needed to be taken into consideration. The original meaning and construct of word have been saved to make the changing possible, while they evolve undergone the development of the society and cultural communication of nations.The study explores the two processes, lexicalization and grammaticalization, and the changing paths, and analyzes the two words, belonging to different languages, from various perspectives. Language learners, especially second language learners, are proposed to be attentive to linguistic adoption contextually.