Research On Human Morphemes In Modern Chinese

Human morpheme originated early, and it has already existed in the Oracle. Through the long process of development of Chinese, its meanings and members of has changed a lot, becoming more and more abundant. With the emergence of cognitive linguistics, human terms has attracted more and more attention, but the study concentrating on the morpheme is still relatively rare. To modern Chinese, some of the human morphemes are still used as a single morpheme word on the one hand, and they constitute a large number of multi-syllable words at the same time, such as "head "and "heart ".However, Some words can not be a word,but only be used to constitute compound words as a morpheme, such as "eye" and "foot". Human morphemes that this article is talking about are those that can show the meanings of human body in modern Chinese, and mainly that show the name of human body parts or organs, totally being 59. During the study, this article put all the words composed of the 59 human morphemes into relevant tables at first, and the words are mainly referred to "Modern Chinese Dictionary" of the fifth edition. Morphemes system is used to build words and make sentences, so the relationship between the morphemes and the words is very close. Therefore, this paper mainly studies the building- words function of the morphemes in modern Chinese, based on discussing the evolution of the morpheme meanings.The human body itself is a system, so the human morpheme as an important part of Chinese morpheme is systematic too. According to different classification methods, the human morpheme has different categories. In order to study the idea more clearly, when analyzing the human morpheme, this paper used a categorically analytic approach according to the semantic relation between them, adhering to the principle that the morphemes are basically consistent in their nominatum or close in the location.This article is divided into seven parts:The first chapter is the introduction. In this part, it introduced the backgrounds and its significances of the research, defined the human morpheme, and briefly described the research methods. Chapter Two is types of human morphemes. It mainly introduced the different categories of human morpheme, including the semantic field, the number of meaning items and functions of morphemes. All the different categories reflect the systematicness of the modern Chinese human morphemes.The third chapter studied the case of the morphemes of head. Morphemes of head are very rich, and according to their relationship of meanings, we divided them into six categories with the principle that the morphemes are basically consistent in their nominatum or close in the location. The first category is head, including head, head and brain. The second includes face, face, Yen, forehead and cheek. The third type contains the mouth, mouth, lips, kiss, tongue, teeth and tooth. The fourth is ears category including ear and nose. The fifth is eye category, including eye, eye, eyes and eyebrows. The sixth is neck Category, including neck, neck, pharynx, larynx and throat. Each sub-field was named after the main morpheme whose ability of building words is the strongest and extended meanings are most abundant. In the main morphemes, some are colloquial morphemes, some are written language, not the same. To sum up, the number of the head morphemes is large, detailed classification is more, extended meanings are plentiful and quantity of constituting is large. But the most prominent feature is that many of the head morphemes or morpheme combinations can be used to refer to the people, such as head, face, mouth, ears, eyes and so on.Chapter four studied the limbs morphemes. According to the level of relevance of their meanings, we divided the limbs semantic field into three categories. The first is hand category, including hand, fist, fingers and palm. The second is arm category, including arm, arm, wrist, elbow, armpit and shoulder. The third is feet category, including foot, feet, legs, knees, hips and toes. Through the study, we found that the relevant morphemes showing limbs meanings are mainly hand and foot.Chapter five studied the lungs organ morphemes. According to the level of relevance of their meanings, we divided the lungs organ semantic field into two categories. One category has the meaning of inner heart and the other has no such extension, meaning simply, as follows: the first is the heart category, including heart, Intestine, liver, gallbladder, spleen and lung. The second is stomach category, including stomach, kidney and pancreas. The morphemes of heart category have more extended meanings and the ability of building words is stronger, but the stomach category does not.Chapter six studied the body morphemes. There are 8 morphemes in this part, and they are shoulder, chest, waist, back, ridge, belly, abdomen and anus. With the waist as the representative whose morpheme meanings are the most and the ability of building words is the strongest, we gave them an analysis. These 8 morphemes have fewer extended meanings and build fewer words.Chapter seven is the conclusion, which summarized the content and results of this study, and pointed out the shortcomings.