The Meaning Construction Of Chinese Nominal Compounds Under The Conceptual Blending Theory

Semantics is a very hot field in the linguistic research. In English, the word is theminimal unit to express the meaning. Generally, any unit smaller than the word can’texpress in the language by itself. Therefore, most scholars who research on the wordswill place their focus on the semantics.The first appearance of Chinese ‘词’ is in Ma Shi Wen Tong, which is fromEnglish by the author of this book. However, the Chinese ci is different from theEnglish word, because the character, the smaller unit than the word, can express themeaning by itself. Actually, in ancient China, there was no word at all; they usedcharacters to express the meaning. Xu Tongqiang brought up the Character-basedTheory based on this condition; he thought that the character is the basic unit inChinese. To this degree, the Chinese words are the combinations of the characters.This thesis will borrow the view of Character-based Theory and adopt the ConceptBlending Theory of the cognitive linguistics to study the meaning construction ofChinese nominal compounds (N+N).Chapter one mainly introduced the research subject of this thesis and the relatedtheory.Chapter two is the literature review. This chapter will define the word first, andthen will make a brief introduction of the study both home and aboard.Chapter three is about theoretical frame of this thesis. This chapter will introducethe main idea and the process of the Concept Blending Theory; it also will add theBuddhist Monk riddle to illustrate.Chapter four will summarize the features of the Chinese after comparing Chineseand English for the next chapter’s analysis.Chapter five is the main body of this thesis, it will introduce the meaning ofcompounds firstly, and then it will classify the Chinese nominal compounds into threemain types. According to the basic meaning of each character of the compounds andthe relation of the characters, I will analyze the typical examples of each type toillustrate the meaning construction with the Conceptual Blending Theory. According to the analysis of previous chapters, chapter six will get the followingconclusions.Firstly, the basic unit of Chinese is the character; secondly, the meaningformation of the nominal compounds is not fixed, it varies from the combination;finally, the meaning is parasitic in the combination of the characters...