Synchronic And Diachronic Research On Chinese Homologous Words

There are a large number of homologous words in modern Chinese.Morphemes of homologous words are related in meaning and share a common superordinate concept but make a difference at the same time.The research object of this dissertation are mainly double-syllable homologous words.The introduction makes a summary of former research achievements of homologous compound words and defines the concept of it clearly.We take Modern Chinese Dictionary(7th edition)as the corpus resource with other handbooks for reference.Homologous compound words are one branch of coordinate compound words with constant research.This dissertation divides coordinate compound words into fair coordinate and non-fair coordinate words,the former are divided into homologous,synonymous and antonymous ones.We conduct further judgement on compound words with grammatical,pragmatic and semantic standards during corpus collection.The first chapter collects all homologous compound words from Modern Chinese Dictionary(7th edition)and conducts qualitative and quantitative research.Firstly we analyse the inner construction of compound words and divide them into eleven kinds,i.e.noun+noun,verb+verb,numeral+numeral,classifier+classifier,etc.Then we use semantic combination theory of Yang Jichun to analyses the inner construction of compound words and divide them into eight kinds such as original meaning+original meaning,original meaning+extensional meaning,original meaning+phonetic loan meaning,extensional meaning+extensional meaning,etc.We find that the meaning and grammatical characters of morphemes determine the overall character of compound words;the coordinate structure and lexical meaning development affect the semantic and grammatical characters of morphemes in return.There exists a relation of mutual constraint in between.The second chapter analyses the possibility of morpheme choice and combination on the basis of research in semantic field.We take the three parts of speech,i.e.noun,verb and adjective as frameworks and classify the semantic fields which morphemes belong to as several kinds so as to analyse the combination mechanism of morphemes from the same semantic field as well as possibility of combination of morphemes from different semantic fields.We draw a conclusion that,the closer morphemes from different semantic fields are in semantics,the more easily they combine into words;morphemes of different parts of speech combine in various ways.The third chapter discusses the relationship between meaning of morphemes and words;classifies the mechanism for word meaning formation as two kinds——addition and subordination,blending and transferring.According to statistics,addition is the dominant mechanism,transferring and blending come next,and subordination takes the smallest proportion.Then we divide compound words into reversible and irreversible ones and analyse the reason of different character orders in compound words.We argue that the main reasons lie in four factors,i.e.semantic,systematic,pragmatic and phonetic ones.Then we make a brief comment.The forth chapter firstly sketches out ways of compound word formation from historical perspective,among which are phrase solidification,grammatical formation and acronym.Then we study nine words,i.e.mei mu "??",chuang hu"??",qin jin"??",gu wu"??",ai mu"??",bai wang“??”,bushi"??",ji dian"??",shui nuan "?",analyse their formation time,character order,semantic characteristics and usage in modern Chinese.At last,we discuss the reasons of development of compound words,i.e.time changes and social development,inner constraint of coordinate structures and pragmatic and rhetoric effects.Finally we summarize the research achievements of this dissertation and point out problems it has solved as well as the drawbacks.