Brief Retrospect And Summary Of The Development History Of English Lexicology In China

Generally speaking, a language is made up of two parts—vocabulary andgrammar. The discipline which studies English vocabulary is called Englishlexicology, while the discipline which studies English grammar can be called Englishsyntactics. In fact, the study of English syntactics starts earlier, develops for longertime and has more achievements than that of English lexicology. Therefore, somescholars have already made brief retrospect and summary of the development historyof English syntactics and published books on the history of English syntactics.Though the birth of English lexicology is later than that of grammar, the lexicology inChina has already experienced a development period of sixty years and now it is timeto make a summary of it also.In Western countries such as Britain and America, there exists the word—Lexicology,but none for books specializing in it, and related research is contained in subjects ofsyntactics, semantics, pragmatics and so on. While in some non-English countriessuch as the former Soviet Union, English lexicology investigation is widelyresearched and many results have been achieved. After the founding of the People’sRepublic, because of political and economic reasons, the relation between China andWestern countries was worse, hence China joined the Socialist Party led by the formerSoviet Union. Under this global situation. The first English book is introduced bytranslating Russian into Chinese which symbolized the prelude of English lexicologyresearch in China. The Cultural Revolution in1966, however, led to the interruptionof the research. As a result, there was no achievements published during that periodand the birth of English lexicology in China is obstructed. In1976when the GreatCultural Revolution ended, English lexicology studies restored its vitality. In1983,the first English lexicology work was independently published by Chinese peopleeventually. The publication of this book symbolized the birth of English lexicology inChina, which also raised the first climax of publications of English lexicology in history. In the subsequent ten years, although there were still some manuals onEnglish lexicology research and the memorization of English words, the publicationof English lexicology works had kept silent for nearly10years. Scholars began toconsider the future of English lexicology. In the late1990s, there appeared a tide ofpublications of English lexicology books which showed the discipline had developedinto a very mature stage. In the21stcentury, scholars have written more Englishlexicology books, but the problem is that most books only repeated the formerresearch results and rarely had their own creation. Thereby, the development ofEnglish lexicology gets stuck into a choke point. Some researchers begin to introspectand think that it is necessary to make the diversion of this subject by expanding itsresearch area if the barrier can be overcome. After the first ten years in the21stcentury,the first book Cognitive Lexicology came into being which focused on subjectivemeaning of words.It is found that the developing process of English lexicology in China is similarto those developing ones of other linguistic subjects experiencing stages ofintroduction, frustration, birth, maturity, stagnation and transition. English lexicologyhas been influenced by factors of scientific conditions, economic status and politicalrelations in any countries. While in China, the influence of political factors surpassesinfluences of science and economy. In addition, English lexicology in China has itsown specialty that it transfers its focus from the traditional English lexicology whichemphasizes objective meaning of words to the cognitive English lexicology whichstresses subjective meaning of words so that the future of this subject will be brightand there is a large number of projects needed to be investigated and explored further.