The Study On Motivation Of Disyllabic And Compound Words In Modern Chinese

Motivation is what symbols can representative and their relevance. The development of Chinese vocabulary has experienced three phrases, they are original words, derived words and compound words. Both original words and derived words are individual words, whose motivations rely on the relevance between their pronunciation and definition. Compound words are composed with two or more morphemes, their motivations rely on the relations between the definition of their morphemes and words themselves. Compound words are the main stream of modern Chinese vocabulary. It is strongly valuable both in theory and application to study the motivation for compound words. Relevant study is benefit to deepening our interpretation to the definition of words, and to the regular pattern of its emerge and development. The achievement can be directly implied to the Chinese teaching, international training course of Chinese, and the regulation for the variant form of Chinese characters, as well as to push the development of relevant subjects. The study on the motivation can be traced back to thousands of years, while the study on compound words, based on modern Chinese, has just started recently.Motivation can be classified into two types: phenotype motivation and covert motivation, according to their transparency. The dissertation targets at the disyllabic and compound words with covert motivation in frequently used-words in modern Chinese. Firstly, it will conduct an individually textual criticism reveal its motivation. Secondly, there will be analyses for the process and result of the textual criticism, summaries of methods for study of the motivation for compound words, as well as discussions on the reasons why the motivations of some compound words are unknown. All linguistic materials in the dissertation come from Modern Chinese Dictionary. As far as I am concerned, there are three aspects to study the motivations of compound words.1. Definitions of compound words. It is the original definitions of words to be stressed here.2. Morpheme definitions of compound words. Concerns should be paid to the ancientry of morpheme, remote definitions, producing of words with definition fulcrum, and original font.3. The reasons why definitions of words and morpheme are combined. To conduct the textual criticism, all the following elements are needed to be considered. They are rhetoric and word creation, historical and cultural background, allusion, and other relevant knowledge.The research in the dissertation only provides the motivations for some words. Please see the annexes for those disyllabic and compound words with unknown motivations in frequently used-words in modern Chinese. Hopefully, it will raise much concern from the researchers.