A Study On The Evolution Of The Meaning Of Chinese "Gather" Verbs

Among the three elements of language,vocabulary is the most active,and the evolution of word meaning is an important topic in vocabulary research.In this paper,the five typical verbs "聚、集、积、敛、凑" in the "gather" verbs are taken as the research object to investigate the evolution of the meaning of the words.Using the method of conceptual element analysis,starting from the inside of the semantic structure,the motivation,mechanism and law of the evolution of the meaning of the "gather" verbs are discussed.This paper is divided into the following five parts:The first part is introduction.It clarifies the research significance,research object,research corpus,theoretical basis and research methods of this paper,and summarizes the existing theories of word meaning evolution,"gather" verbs and research results of word meaning evolution.The second part is the first chapter.Analyze the conceptual elements of the meaning of "gather" of each member in the "gather" concept field.First,explore the source of the meaning of "gathering" of each member;Secondly,with the "concept field" as the background,determine the "gather" conceptual domain and its concept elements;Finally,the "conceptual element analysis method" is used to analyze the "gather" meaning of each member from the perspective of sememe composition.Part Three,Chapter two.Comprehensively investigate the corpus of each period,systematically describe the use of each member in the concept field in different periods,sort out the extended context of each member,and make statistics on the age and frequency of each sememe,and observe the changes of each member’s sememes.It can be seen from the analysis that,on the whole,the collocation structure of the conceptual elements forming the "gather" verbs is relatively stable at the sentence structure.Part Four,Chapter three.To explore the causes and mechanisms of the evolution of "gather" verbs,and summarize the laws of the evolution of their members.Through the analysis,it can be found that the main factors affecting the evolution of word meaning are the increase or decrease of context motivation and the concept elements of word meaning or the change of content.From a cognitive point of view,metaphor and metonymy are the main mechanisms for the semantic evolution of "gather" verbs.The increase or decrease of the aim elements will affect the evolution direction of the "gather" verbs,and the specific evolution direction is "from action to purpose".From the perspective of the change of conceptual domain,the verbs of "gather" have evolved from the conceptual domain of "gather" to the conceptual domain of "reserve" and the conceptual domain of "change of ownership";The verbs of "gathering" have the tendency of evolution from self-change to promoting change;The verbs of "gather" are consistent with the evolution of Chinese "synthetic-toanalytic".The fifth part is the conclusion.Summarize the research results and point out the deficiencies.