Zhou, Qin, Han, "speculation" Verbs Research

On the basis of "Sematic Field Theory", the thesis focused on the evolution of32verbs with conjecture meaning by adopting the methods of the combination of Synchronic and diachronic, quality and quantity.The whole thesis is composed of seven chapters. The first chapter will give a brief introduction to the theoretical background, literature review, significance, study focus, corpus selection, research methodology and criteria of selected members.Chapter two and three mainly study verbs with conjecture meaning in Zhou, Qin and Han dynasties. To begin with, the author will select the verbs with conjecture meaning from ancient and modern rhetorical books. Then, thirty five classical literature corpus in Zhou, Qin and Han dynasties will be chosen and examined, from which altogether thirty two verbs with conjecture meaning are extracted. Finally, the thesis will give a thorough study on the changing of words meaning, usage in ancient times and their derived usage. In addition, all the instances quoted in the thesis can be found in the original articles so as to ensure the accuracy of quotation.Chapter four and chapter five will compare the dominant and non-dominant verbs with conjecture meaning in Zhou, Qin and Han dynasties respectively. Since there exist large differences of the usage frequency between the dominant and non-dominant verbs, the thesis will discuss them in two chapters. As the verbs in the same semantic field are mutual associate and restrict with each other, it’s necessary to examine and summarize the distinctive features and their restrict relationship of the lexical meaning. Therefore, the thesis will mainly focus on the comparison of the object collocation and lexical meaning of verbs with conjecture meaning in chapter four and five. The thesis will compare and summarize the differences of object collocation and lexical meaning of both each verb and mutual verb members in Zhou, Qin and Han dynasties.Based on the study of the previous chapters, chapter six will conclude the diachronic evolution of verbs with the semantics of "conjecture" in Zhou, Qin and Han dynasties from two angles. Firstly, with regard to the semantic field, four aspects will be involved, which including the dying of the old words, creating of new words, the inheriting and changing of the old words and the characteristics of diachronic evolution. Secondly, in terms of the relationship of words meaning changing among different members, the thesis will classify the verbs with "conjecture" meaning into several subclasses according to sememe motion patterns in derived words meaning and overlap type of derived meaning. Besides, the features of diachronic evolution of words meaning will also be summarized.In chapter seven, the author will give e a conclusion on the whole study. Meanwhile, the study limitations will also be put forwarded.