An Empirical Study Of The Pos Labeling Of "X+化" Words In A Chinese-English Dictionary (3^rd Edition)

Word class is an important part of grammatical study, and the POS labeling indictionaries is a hot issue. Chinese POS labeling has always been a knotty and thornyproblem. Chinese is the labeled object in Chinese-English dictionaries in terms ofPOS, while the Chinese-English dictionaries with POS labeling are steadily on theincrease in recent years. However, the POS labeling reference system of mostChinese-English dictionaries is that of Chinese dictionaries, and the criterion of wordclass identification in Chinese is debatable, so the POS labeling of Chinese-Englishdictionaries is still problematic.Since some scholars hold that semantic performance is the criterion of wordclass identification in Chinese and “化” indicates a change of state,“X+化” wordsare usually regarded as verbs ending with “化” by many Chinese linguists. But thereis no previous study on the POS labeling of “X+化” words in Chinese-Englishdictionaries based on the corpus pattern usage survey.This thesis has chosen “X+化” words in the authoritative A Chinese-EnglishDictionary (3rdedition, CED3for short) as our research objects, and has conductedan empirical study of the shared “X+化” words in A Chinese-English Dictionary (2ndedition, CED2for short), A Chinese-English Dictionary (1stedition, CED1for short)and The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (5thedition, CCD5for short) from bothdiachronic and synchronic perspectives, in order to find out the similarities anddifferences of POS labeling of “X+化” words in Chinese and Chinese-Englishdictionaries. At the same time, the thesis retrieves the usage patterns of “X+化”words based on CED3from Internet-ZH corpus in Sketch Engine exhaustively. It isfound that there are195“X+化” words in CED3, of which177items are labeled asverb predominantly. Among the195items of “X+化” words, the POS of32headwords and their translation equivalents are inconsistent, which does not abide by the principle of “Translating by POS”; within33groups of symmetrical groups of“X+化” words,22groups are under asymmetrical treatment, which does not observethe symmetrical principle; the number of multiple class membership of “X+化”words is so limited. Based on the corpus usage pattern survey,“X+化” words arecategorized into15subclasses in terms of their potential word classes, and it is foundthat nearly1/2of the “X+化” words belong to multiple class membership. All theseresults are illustrating the problematic criteria of word class identification inChinese-English dictionaries. This thesis gets the conclusion that the POS labeling of“X+化” words in Chinese-English dictionaries should be on the basis of large-scalebalanced corpora by analyzing the unmarked grammatical or syntactic orexpressional functions of the words to determine their word class membership, andChinese-English dictionaries should also provide corresponding translationequivalents and typical examples in light of POS.This thesis has not only practical implication for Chinese-English dictionarycompilation, but also theoretical values to the Chinese grammar researches.