A Study On The Diachronic Evolution Of The Meaning Of "Eye" "Head" And "Face" In Chinese

This paper studies the diachronic evolution of the meanings of three groups of words:“mu”（目）and “yan”（眼）,“yuan”（元）“shou”（首）and “tou”（头）,and “mian”（面）and“lian”（脸）.There is a diachronic substitution relationship among the same group of words expressing the same concept.In the diachronic evolution process,each word produces several extended meanings,and there are differences and similarities in the era,evolution path and direction of each meaning.In this paper,referring to the definitions of large historical dictionaries such as The Grand Chinese Dictionary and the Chinese Dictionary,combined with the corpus,the emergence time of each meaning term is investigated in detail,and the similarities and differences between the evolution paths and directions of the meanings of words in the same group are compared,so as to explain the mechanisms involved and explain the reasons for the evolution.The main contents of this paper are as follows: Introduction introduces the source of the topic,research status,research object,research method and corpus selection;The first chapter takes the prominent features of “mu”（目）and “yan”（眼）as the axis,lists the meanings,examines the extended ways between the meanings,and explains the similarities and differences between the meanings of the two words.The second chapter,based on category theory,shows the detailed context of the semantic extension of each meaning of “yuan”（元）“shou”（首）and “tou”（头）,and discusses the causes and prominent features of each category.The third chapter analyzes the semantic extension of “mian”（面）and “lian”（脸）according to the category theory.The fourth chapter on the basis of the former three chapters,discusses the diachronic evolution of Chinese words “eye”,“head” and “face”,and explain the relationship between the evolution of semantics and cognitive factors,will take the word meaning evolution research and dictionary work to combine,as large dictionaries added new meanings,beginning see documentary evidence in advance,for dictionary meanings of setting,sequence arrangement provides important reference.The conclusion summarizes the main research contents of the thesis and points out the shortcomings of the thesis.Through a comparative study on the diachronic evolution of the semantics of three groups of words,we believe that the similarities and differences in the semantic evolution of the Chinese words “eye”,“head” and “face” reflect the interaction between the laws of the language system and cognitive factors: the collocation within the language system affects people’s perception of The extraction of semantic elements,cognitive factors restrict the development and evolution of the language system;the evolution mechanism is metaphor and metonymy;it mainly highlights three characteristics of appearance,location and function.