A Study Of The Word Class Labeling Of Polysyllabic Entries In Chinese-English Dictionaries

In the linguistic study,the problems of the word class categorization,especially those in modern Chinese and other analytic languages,have never been properly solved.In modern Chinese,disyllabic words are the most prototypical members in Chinese words and account for the largest proportion.As a result,there are more studies on Chinese disyllabic words,and the studies of the Chinese word classes also choose disyllabic words as their objects of study.Consequently,there are few studies on the Chinese polysyllabic words,let alone the study on their word classes,and they mainly focus on the phonetic,semantic and structural aspects.However,with a large number of new words entering the system of Chinese vocabulary,the polysyllabization of Chinese vocabulary is increasingly prominent,and the proportions of the disyllabic and polysyllabic words have changed fundamentally in modern Chinese neologisms.In view of the above considerations,this thesis,under the guidance of the Two-level Word Class Categorization Theory and based upon the large-scale Chinese balanced corpora,takes as the objects of study the shared polysyllabic entries in CED3 and NCCED2 which are labeled with the word class information in at least one of the two dictionaries,and conducts a comparative study to investigate the differences in the word class labeling of the polysyllabic entries in Chinese-English dictionaries.It is found that in CED3 and NCCED2,there are 9341 shared polysyllabic entries which are labeled with the word class information in at least one of the two dictionaries.Among them,692 polysyllabic entries are different in the identification of their word classes,in which 322 polysyllabic entries are completely different in their word classes and 370 polysyllabic entries are considered as words and labeled their word classes in one dictionary while the other dictionary classifies them as idioms rather than words.What’s more,the proportions of the multi-category words in CED3 and NCCED2 are solely 15.22% and13.04% respectively,which are far lower than 64.59% on the corpus-based investigation.The study shows that CED3 and NCCED2 are not only different in the word classlabeling of the polysyllabic entries,but also artificially minimized the number of multi-category words,and failed to reach an agreement on the identification of polysyllabic words and non-words.In this paper,the study of the word class of the polysyllabic entries in CED3 and NCCED2 can not only help to deepen the study of the modern Chinese word class,but also to improve the compilation quality of Chinese-English dictionaries and propagate Chinese to the world.