The Research About The Semantic System Of Characters Of Twenty-five Radicals About Geography In Shuo Wen

ShuoWenJieZi, written by Xu Shen in Eastern Han Dynasty, is oneof the most significant masterpieces in the linguistic history ofChinese. In this great writings, numerous exegetical achievementsabout the Pre-Qin and two Han dynasties is preserved to reflect thegeneral profile in the ancient China.For the first time in history, XuShen invented radicals in ShuoWenJieZi, which classified9353Chinese characters to540radicals. To a certain extent, theaggregation of radicals grounded on the similar semantics meaningreflects that of vocabulary semantic system.Zou Xiaoli, a professor inBeijing Normal University, sorted radicals of ShuoWen into sevencategories according to the meaning. Some radicals that take natureas the content are divided into two smaller categories: radicals aboutastronomical phenomena and geography.The smaller category ofradicals about geography is researched in this paper. In order toestablish a completer semantic system of25radicals characters inShuoWen, the original meaning and characters of25radicals, whichexclude the new attached characters written by Xu Xuan, areclassified in the perspectives of meaning and analyzed in sememe.Five Sections are involved in this paper. As the introduction, the first section is to introduce the basis to select material, currentdevelopment and objection of research, and the method andsignificance of research.The second section ranges over the originalmeaning and semanteme classification of25radicals aboutgeography in ShuoWen.To explore the original meaning, the workgoes ahead based on the Four Experts outputs about ShuoWen, otherannotations and word interpretation in wordbook. Consequently, itdivided25radicals into four categories, including hydrology, hill andvalley, soil and stone, metal based on the original meaning.To pavethe way for establishing the semantic system, every collectedcharacter is classified into nominal, behavior, nature and state basedon the three semantic classification standard mentioned in theChinese semantics written by Mr. Jia Yande.The third section focuseson sememe analysis. In order to figure out the nuances of meaningbetween the glossemes in same semantic field, the sememe isanalyzed and a table about this issue is established. The semanticsystem of characters are summarized, and then displayed in theformat of tables in the fifth section. Meanwhile, the semantic field isanalyzed to draw a conclusion.The fifth section is a summary aboutthe whole paper. Any comments about it are appreciated.