A Study On Diachronic Changes Of The Conceptual Field Of Cutting From Archaic To Middle Chinese

The conceptual field of cutting includes conceptions of somebody separating an object apart with a tool while the incision matches precisely with the path of the motion.Correspondingly,there are a cluster of verbs used to describe these conceptions as their mappings in languages.Verbs of the conceptual field of cutting are of great value to the study of the history of Chinese language and philology as a case study of core words and basic words in Chinese.Overseas research shows interest in the semantic distinguish and syntactic features of cutting verbs,while domestic research requires further investigation.Therefore,it is well worth to study verbs in the conceptual field of cutting.The conceptual field of cutting is a dynamic system with sophisticated structures and large number of verbs in history.During the period of Archaic and Middle Chinese,conceptions and verbs related to cutting had changed a lot.This conceptual field can be divided into three sub-fields: cutting off,cutting open and trimming.Verbs in every sub-field experienced historical changes with respect to numbers,distribution,conceptual element,frequency and register.Based on the theory of conceptual field,this thesis tried to fully examine verbs in this field and analyze their semantic features using the method of conceptual element analysis which investigates conceptual elements like AGENT,TOOL,OBJECT,MANNER(including FORCE,CONTACT,DIRECTION and PATH),SEBSEQUENCE and INTENTION.This thesis contains five chapters.Chapter one acts as an introduction of the background,methodology and materials of the research.Chapter two to four consist of the core of the thesis with each chapter describe a sub-field respectively.The conceptual field of cutting off includes hypernyms like jue(?),duan(?),tuan(?)and jie(?),and verbs whose meanings are strictly confined by the element OBJECT,as well as those confined by the element FORCE like fa(?),zhuo(?),and fu(?).With a hypernym pou(?),the field of cutting open can be divided into two subfields according to whether the objects of these verbs have inner contents.The field of trimming has a hypernym xue(?),and is divided into three subfields consist shearing off,scraping and handmaking,considering conceptual elements DIRECTION and INTENTION.The final chapter gives a brief summary.To sum up,in Archaic Chinese,what is noticeable is that verbs in the conceptual field of cutting were mostly synthetic with OBJECT and MANNER being the most important restrictions on their meanings,leaving aside the large number of them.In Middle Chinese,however,the former structure of this field was falling down due to the rise of verb-complement structures,which led to the inner semantic element SEBSEQUENCE externalizing into the resultative complements with more freedom in use.Moreover,some old verbs were replaced by new verbs or faded away,others remained with changes in frequency and conceptual elements.The appearance of language is shaped not only by the interaction between lexical and grammatic changes,and also by that between conceptual elements and surface structures embodied in words.