On Linguistic Decategorization And Its Evolving Process

The study on Categorization is a very important branch in cognitive linguistics. With categorization, a kind of cognitive means, people can classify various organisms, objects, events or actions into different categories, for example, the colour categories including RED, YELLOW, and GREEN categories etc. The product of categorization is cognitive categories. In other words, categorization is helpful for people to establish categories. However, with the development of people's cognition, a categorial entity would not belong to a certain category for ever. Before recategorization, some categorial entities might be in an unstable and intermediate state. Such a phenomenon bears a great relationship with decategorization. Unlike categorization, decategorization draws little attention from linguists or related researchers. Up to now, only two linguists, Liu Zhengguang and Liu Runqing, clearly defined the term "decategoration" from the perspective of linguistics. Few researchers noticed the evolving process of categorial entities in the processing of decategorization.The objective of this study is (ⅰ) to redefine the term decategorization based on Liu Zhengguang and Liu Runqing's definition; and (ⅱ)make a tentative study to demarcate the evolving process of categorial entities in the process of decategorization. To prove that the redefinition is correct and the demarcation of the evolving process of categorial entities is reasonable, this paper makes a diachronic study by taking the historical evolvement of the Chinese character Mao(毛)as an example. This paper collects many data about two Chinese characters YU(羽)and Mao(毛)representing two noun categories, observes and analyzes the semantic change of MAO(毛)CATEGORY.This thesis is divided into six chapters.The first chapter is a brief introduction to this thesis, including the objective of the thesis and its thesis structure.The second chapter is a literature review of the previous studies in the west and China about the categorization theory and decategorization theory. The relationship between categorization and decategoration is discussed in this chapter too.The third chapter is a theoretical analysis on the previous definition of the term linguistic decategorization. This chapter points out the limitations of the previous definition and tries to redefine it.The fourth chapter makes a theoretical analysis on the evolving process of categorial entities in the processing of decategoration and maintains that categorial entities will usually experience three stages in the processing of decategorization, namely, StageⅠ, an initial period, StageⅡ, an intermediate period and StageⅢ, the finish period. The features and category membership of categorial entities in three stages are discussed.The fifth chapter takes the evolving process of the MAO(毛) Category as an example to illustrate the previous demarcation.The last chapter is a conclusion of the thesis. Limitations of the study are also discussed.