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A Study Of Wordhood Representation In New Century Chinese-English Dictionary(2ndEdition)

Posted on:2020-06-08Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:Z Z HuoFull Text:PDF
GTID:2415330572992135Subject:English Language and Literature
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Linguistic categories are hailed as“God Particles”of language,and wordhood,the category of word,is one of the most critical and difficult issues,as well as one of the hottest issues in linguistic studies.Current studies on wordhood based on the whole population of dictionaries involve the empirical study of A Contemporary Chinese Dictionary(5th ed.)(CCD5 for short)and that of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language(5th ed.).Yet,although some research with respect to Chinese-foreign language dictionaries has probed into the wordhood of Modern Chinese,none of them is based on the whole population,making it rewarding to conduct this empirical study of a Chinese-English dictionary whose size is far larger than that of CCD5.This thesis,under the guidance of Usage-based Theory,investigates the wordhood representation of Modern Chinese recognized in A New Century Chinese-English Dictionary(2nd ed.)(NCCED2 for short)through the use of the DIY Database of the Word Class Labeling Information of NCCED2.It is found that the wordhood recognized in NCCED2 shows prototype effects,and that both achievements and problems exist in the representation of wordhood in NCCED2.The achievements are that the lexemes included in the dictionary better reflect the status quo of units of vocabulary,and that the recognition of non-morpheme characters in NCCED2 has a slight advantage over that in CCD5.These achievements cannot hide the problems that all the bound morphemes are labeled with word classes and that no explicit or implicit labeling information is given to separable words.The causes of the former problem are the negative influence of the previous edition and also the compilers’misunderstanding of what it means to be“standing alone”.The cause of the latter problem is that the compilers fail to distinguish different levels of reality/truth so that they,under the governance of the law of excluded middle,cannot explain the linguistic phenomenon that a linguistic unit belongs to two or more grammatical hierarchies at the level of langue.This study hopes to deepen our understanding of wordhood in Modern Chinese and to inspire the labeling of grammatical units in Chinese and Chinese-foreign language dictionaries.
Keywords/Search Tags:A New Century Chinese-English Dictionary(2nd ed.), wordhood, Usage-based Theory, representation
PDF Full Text Request
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