| Chinese core words are important windows to observe Chinese vocabulary and semantic changes. However, the core word research is still at an early stage nowadays, which demands us to make every effort to do the research on theory and practice of this field in order to establish a more scientific history of Chinese core word as early as possible. This paper was just based on such a situation. Using the methods of historical comparative linguistics and cognitive linguistics and with the help of the theory of semantic field, we tried to link the words related with Ren(人)and study systematically their semantic development rules as well as their intrinsic evolution mechanisms, so that we can observe Chinese semantic development macroscopically, and search for and reveal the general characteristics of semantic development of all the natural languages.The paper includes about 220,000 words and is made up of nine chapters. The first chapter is the introduction to the general situation of the research on Chinese core word Ren(人),the study objectives, research materials, research methods and research significance. The chapter 2 to 8 divided the core words Ren(人) into seven large categories according to the five standards, i.e. sex, age, occupation and social status, facial features and qualities, and relatives. The upper word Ren(人) is discussed in an independent chapter. The words which are not easily categorized are all divided into the seventh category'"other people". Finally it forms 38 large or small semantic fields. We studied the more than 900 words in the 38 semantic fields one by one. Chapter 9 summarized the characteristics of the core word Ren(人)as well as the characteristics of Chinese semantic development and evolution, and pointed out the innovation points, deficiencies and future direction of this study.Through the research on the core words Ren(人),we found that the words of this concept are strongly restricted by cultures. Different words are derived from different social and cultural backgrounds. If one social and cultural background died, then its related words are also died. It is also found that there are plenty of members in the semantic fields as the meanings of the words of this concept are very specific; the appellations about relatives are highly generalized and most of them had became a social appellation to call those people without any relative relationship; meanwhile, as one of the Chinese core words, the typical words in each semantic field of Ren(人)also demonstrated the characteristic of stability and some of them are especially stable for both their meanings and forms make little change.The main innovative points of this paper are as following:(1) It is the first time to study the Chinese core word Ren(人)systematically and deeply using the theory of semantic field and do the complete survey to the nouns related with Ren(人)from the semantic angle, which lay the foundation for the all-sided research on Chinese core words and basic vocabulary.(2) Using the method of comparison meanings. We collected all the related materials in Chinese literatures, divided the words into several semantic fields, then linked the words according to their meanings in a semantic field, and finally studied these words one by one. In addition, we compared Chinese vocabulary and dialects with vocabulary of Sino-Tibetan, and other peoples and other countries'languages, which made the Chinese vocabulary research being set in a larger background.(3) Utilizing the related theories of cognitive linguistics to explain the intrinsic mechanism of the semantic development and the performances of human being's common cognitive mechanism on languages. All kinds of language materials of different peoples and different countries are also used to illuminate the general characteristics of the development of the human being's natural languages and the typical characteristics of semantic development.
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