A Study Of The Word Class Labeling Of “X ?” Disyllabic Lexemes In A Chineseenglish Dictionary (3^rd Edition) From The Perspective Of The Two-Level Word Class Categorization Theory

The study of word classes has been a thorny issue over the years.And it was acknowledged as the study of “God particles” in language.Word class categorization of over 1000 analytic languages like Modern Chinese is still the Goldbach Conjecture in linguistics.The immaturity in Chinese word class studies and word class labeling causes lots of confusions in Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries.Although many achievements have been made on the researches of Chinese-English dictionaries,word class labeling has been a major concern in recent years.Given the deficiency in the theoretical basis and approach of previous studies,this thesis will conduct a corpus-based study on the word class labeling of 60 “X ?”disyllabic lexemes in A Chinese-English Dictionary(3rdEdition)from the perspective of the Two-level Word Class Categorization Theory.With the help of the second and the first editions of A Chinese-English Dictionary and The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary(6thEdition),we will combine diachronic comparison with synchronic analysis to find out the consistencies and inconsistencies in word class labeling of 60 “X ? ” disyllabic lexemes.And then we will ascertain their usage pattern in the Modern Chinese Corpus of the Center for Chinese Linguistics in Peking University as well as Internet-ZH corpus in Sketch Engine to get their true word classes.It is found that in CED3 there are contradictions in terms of the treatment of 60“X ?” disyllabic lexemes.Most of them are labeled as single verbs and only 2 as multi-category lexemes.However,our qualitative and quantitative analysis finds that there are 11 different types of multiple class membership and that the number of multi-category lexemes is almost half of all “X ?” disyllabic lexemes.So the thesis verifies that the word class labeling of “X ?” disyllabic lexemes does not conform to the fact that the word class categorization exists at parole and langue(Wang,2014),and blindly abides by the “Principle of Parsimony” with the guidance of logicalfallacy so that the number of multi-category lexemes is artificially minimized.Therefore,the labeling of word classes in Chinese-English dictionaries should consider the levels of langue and parole,follow accurate criteria for classification,and depend on corpus-based usage pattern surveys.From a brand-new perspective,the thesis conducts a corpus-based study on the“X ?” disyllabic lexemes in CED3,which can not only help to improve the quality of the compilation of Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries as a whole,but also deepen the study of word class in Modern Chinese.