An Empirical Study Of The Word Class Labeling Of Disyllabic “X?” Lexemes In A Chinese-English Dictionary (3^rd Edition)

Categorization like word class or part of speech is taken as the study of “God Particles” in language.And the languages like Modern Chinese and Modern English can be considered as the “Goldbach Conjecture” in linguistics.The researches of word class mainly focus on multifunctionality or heterosemy of lexemes and this phenomenon has been a controversial topic for a long time.The word classes labeling object in Chinese-English dictionaries is Chinese and the references system in most Chinese-English dictionaries depends on that in Chinese dictionaries.However,there is no consistency about the criteria of the word classes labeling in Chinese,so it is not surprising that there still exists problems on the word classes labeling in the Chinese-English dictionaries.In modern Chinese,the words with suffix “?” form a large system,and this issue has been learned and researched controversially.This thesis adopted the Two-level Word Class Categorization Theory(TLWCCT for short)as its basic theory and chose all the disyllabic “X ?” lexemes in the authorative A Chinese-English Dictionary(the 3rd edition)(CED3 for short)as its researching objects.Then all these disyllabic “X ?” lexemes in CED3 will be made a comparison with A Chinese-English Dictionary(the 2nd edition)(CED2 for short),A Chinese-English Dictionary(the 1st edition)(CED1 for short)and the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary(the 6th edition)(CCD6 for short)from a synchronic and diachronic perspective.At the same time we also applied two large corpora to analyze the grammatical function or usage pattern of these lexemes.After this full-sample investigation in corpus and analysis of the result,we find that the whole word class labeling condition is more scientific and comprehensive than before in CED3,however,for the 167 disyllabic “X ?” lexemes in CED3,64.63% are labeled as adjective,20.73% dverbials.Besides,only 8.54% are treated as multiple class membership,among which only 6.1% are labeled as both adjective and adverbial.However,by analyzing these lexemes in the large-balanced corpus,it is seen that the number of multiple class membership is much more than that in CED3,which is taking up 59.03% and the lexemes belong to both adjective and adverbial are 53.47%.This manifests that CED3 has taken the word class labeling system in CCD as reference,and adopted the “Principle of Parsimony”Based on the large-balanced corpus,this thesis has not only made a scientific and systematic identification of word classes labeling for all the disyllabic “X ?” lexemes in CED3,but also helped to find the limits in the C-E dictionaries' compilation and improve the dictionaries' quality.At the same time,this study can also make a deeper exploration for the Chinese word classes labeling.