A Construction Morphology Study Of New Chinese Derivative Cyber Word Quasi-affixes

In the 21 st century,the increasingly frequent cultural exchanges,the close information communication and the rapidly-developed Internet technology have greatly driven people's innovative use of modern Chinese language.With new words appearing constantly,they enrich the modern Chinese language vocabulary,and among them,new Chinese derivative cyber words with strong word-formation ability are the most representative.These words are highly productive,accompanied by a large number of newly-emerged quasi-affixes at the same time.The term “quasi-affix” was formally proposed by L? Shuxiang in his book Problems in Analyzing Chinese Grammar in 1979.New cyber words appear in abundance,indicating that modern Chinese language has its morphological change trend and the quasi-affix is a morphological marker of this language.Influenced by structuralist linguistics,traditional Chinese linguistics has neglected the morphological study of Chinese vocabulary to some extent.Chinese vocabulary analysis based on the unit of morpheme still leads to no adequate and feasible explanation of some unique phenomena in Chinese vocabulary such as reduplicative words,network homophonic words,letter words,quasi-affixes.Moreover,most of the existing Chinese lexical studies conduct the affix analysis from bottom to top by adopting the Western morphology theory,but in the light of the characteristics of Chinese language itself,the Chinese lexical studies can also take affixes as constructions,analyze the conditions of the roots to enter such constructions from top to bottom,and interpret the overall meaning of constructions after affixes and roots are combined.In China,the theories related to construction grammar are mostly applied to the study of Chinese sentence structure,but the research on lexical construction has not attracted much attention.Therefore,this thesis will take thequasi-affix of new derivative Chinese cyber words as a research object and carry out a constructional morphology study on it.Because of the highly frequent transmission on the Internet of “-ti” and “yun-”as a landmark of the arrival of “big-intelligent-mobile-cloud” era,this thesis selects the quasi-prefix “yun-” and the quasi-suffix “-ti” as the representative,and collects125 “-ti” words and 177 “yun-” words in sum,with the help of weibo,Sogou/Baidu and other network searching tools,and the already summarized target data in previous studies.This thesis employs Booij's word-based Construction Morphology theory to conduct a detailed description and meaning analysis of the language facts of “-ti” and “yun-” and generalizes the morphological schemas of these two cyber word families.Taking qualitative study as its primary means and quantitative study as the secondary one,this thesis first displays the classifications of new Chinese derivative cyber words “-ti” and “yun-” with some numerical results and tables supplemented,secondly explicates the forms and meanings of the quasi-prefix“yun-” and the quasi-suffix “-ti” with the aid of the old and modern dictionaries,the Chinese and English dictionaries,and thirdly makes a comprehensive and concrete interpretation of constructional meanings and morphological schemas of new Chinese derivative cyber words “-ti” and “yun-” with the collected data as its base.The construction morphological analysis in this thesis shows the following major findings.Firstly,vocabulary can be regarded as one type of construction.Lexical construction is the information synthesis of words' sound,form and meaning,and vocabulary is stored in learners' minds in the unit of words rather than isolated morphemes.Secondly,based on the analysis of concrete examples of “-ti” and“yun-”,this thesis finds that the core idea of Construction Morphology theory is still inherited from the holistic view of Construction Grammar theory.The meaning of a new word is no longer a simple sum of the meaning of affixes and roots,but is endowed by the overall meaning of a whole word,as a construction.Thirdly,it is theconstruction meaning and construction schemas of newly-emerged cyber words that makes derivative words in a great quantity available.In conclusion,this thesis is of great help to summarize the formation rules of new Chinese derivative cyber words and to predict the new words formation,and most importantly,it provides a new operating method and research perspective for the morphological study of Chinese quasi-affixes.It is a breakthrough and an attempt for the Construction Grammar theory's application in word level,as well as the application and verification of Construction Morphology theory.Besides,the research on quasi-affixes also contributes to the translation of new cyber words,Chinese vocabulary teaching and lexicography.