Research On The Words About Name And Thing In Contemporary Chinese Dictionary

Contemporary Chinese Dictionary is one of the most significant Chinese dictionaries. There are numbers of research findings that are relative to the dictionary, including the choice of word, the phonetic notation, the character patterns and the interpretation etc. But we can't find the specialized study of the interpretation of the Words about Name and Thing in the dictionary we talked about. This kind of nouns plays a big part and is very important in the dictionary, so we should pay more attention to it. We inspected these nouns systematically, and investigated their interpretation in three aspects: ways, contents, and principles. In this way, we can not only enrich the content of the theory of interpretation of the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, but also offer a certain reference to the work of compiling and revising of Chinese dictionaries.Our topic was based on the corpus. We choose 1003 words from the system of the relevant nouns as the objects of our study, including 6 semantic fields: orbs, animals, plants, physiognomies, implements and diseases. We input them to the computer, established a database, and then analyzed and labeled them. During the course of the research, we studied the kind of nouns from the angles of synchronic and diachronic with the methods of qualitative and quantitative research and comparative studies.First, we gave the ways of the interpretation a whole investigation and study. We summarized seven ways to interpret these kinds of nouns, they are defining, describing and explaining, corresponding interpretation, overlapping, intersecting, synthesizing and transferring. Among these ways, observed the two of them that are more frequently used in detail so that we analyzed the problems that are related to them in the dictionary. In this part, we found there are a distinguish difference between the further classification and the current researches. Firstly, we divided them on the base of the order of the word families and differentia. Secondly, we classified them according to the certain additional content of interpretation. Before this, scholars (take Fu Huaiqing and Huang Jianhua for example) just gave them the first classification.Next, we studied the certain nouns in the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (2005) in a macroscopic way. It can be divided into two aspects to analyze: the content and the additional content of the interpretation. The main content of the interpretation was divided into 14 classes. They are the exterior characteristics, applications, performance characteristics, time, subjective evaluation, space or geographical position, material, causes, methods of production, quantity, fields or ranges, purposes, life habits and orders. The additional content was divided into two classes on the base of the forms: marked and non-marked. After that, we classified them into several different subclasses. We analyzed the problems on the base of the description and classification.Last, we compared three dictionaries: the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (2005 and 1978) and the Contemporary Chinese Normative Dictionary. We paid our attention to the methods and content of the interpretation. There are few differences among the methods of the interpretation, but a lot of differences can be found in the content of the interpretation. It can be explained that in the modern Chinese dictionaries, the methods of the interpretation are stable while the contents are on the contrary. Because that the knowledge of the compilers are different. And the development of the society urges the content to change. On the bases of the relative analysis and the informed research, we summarized eight principles on how to interpret these special nouns: systematically, scientifically, accurately, perfectly and generally, correctly, reasonably, briefly and commonly. Of course that these principles are not only applicable to the nouns we are talking about, but also be applicable to other words on interpretation.