Research On Naming Motivation In The Dress Kind Words Of Shuowen

The culture of clothing has a long history. The development of clothing is regarded as a cultural history of China. "Shuo Wen Jie Zi " by Shen Xu investigates a large number of words associated with clothes, which comprehensively describes the Chinese ancient words of clothing. In this paper, we take the words from “Shuo Wen Jie Zi” as the study corpora, learn from the approaches proposed by previous researchers, especially adopt the etymological meaning introduced by Mr. Ning Wang as the measure, and apply sememe analysis,the unified tracing approach based on syntax, pronunciation and semantic, as well as the comparative mutual proof to explore the naming rationale for clothing words in “Shuo Wen Jie Zi”. Further, we employ the techniques in cognitive linguistics and statistics to summarize the naming categories and rules. We can thus reveal the naming characteristics of the Chinese ancient words of clothing. This paper is composed of five parts.The first part is an introduction. It mainly presents the motivation, research purpose, research task, and research significance. It also covers the theoretical foundation, research approaches, and the standard adopted to determine the pronunciation and meaning of cognate words. Moreover, it provides a literature survey of global researches regarding clothing words.The second part briefly discusses the clothing culture, defines the research scope of clothing words and classifies the clothing words. We choose the words of clothing in "Shuo Wen Jie Zi " as the study corpora, and divide them into three categories according to the position, namely head-clothing words, body-clothing words, and foot-clothing words.This third part investigates the naming rationale and analyzes the naming types of clothing words. By applying sememe analysis and the unified tracing approach, we explore the naming rationale one by one. According to the characteristics, the naming rationales are categorized into four types: feature naming, shape naming, functional naming, and causal naming.The fourth part summarizes the naming rules and features of clothing words. Through analyzing the categories of naming rationale, we sum up the naming principles of ancient words associated with clothing. In general, vision and feature have higher priority. Head-clothing words naming is given priority to feature and function. During the naming of words associated with upper clothes, the feature has higher priority and shape is the highest. The naming of words for pants varies for different kinds. There’re two types of foot-clothing words: shoes and socks, where shoes words are mainly based on the features while socks based on shape.The fifth part concludes. It briefly summarizes the research contents, and talks about the limitations of this research.