Word-formation Study On ABB-type Color Adjectives In Modern Chinese

The ABB-type Color Adjevtive is not only under the category of ABB-type adjective, but also a special part of the color terms, thus previous study mostly start from these two aspects. Based on the ABB-type color adjevtive recorded in common by five authoritative modern Chinese dictionary, this paper mainly talks about four issues including way of word-building, motivation of word-building, semantic features and preservation mechanism.Chapter 1 is the Introduction. It explains selection principle of the research objects, reviews existing findings about ABB-type Color Adjective, and states relevant methods, values and sources of examples of this study.Chapter 2 discusses word-building of ABB-type color adjective. Firstly it distinguishes several possible ways of word-building of ABB-type adjectives from perspective of word-building and form-building, indicates that "A+BB" is the primary approach of ABB-type color adjective. Then it demonstrates the root attribute of BB on the basis of a diachronic study, which proves ABB-type color adjective to be compound word.Chapter 3 classifies BB to 7 categories according to their semantic traits, explores the semantic relationship between A and BB to investigates word-building motivation of these words. It concludes that Synaethetic-metaphor way of thinking and dependency relation between light and color are two major motivations to construct ABB-type color adjective.Chapter 4 probes into semantic features. First, it summarizes general semantic characteristics of ABB by comparing them with color terms A. Secondly, it analyses the detailed meaning consisting of the meaning of A and BB. Finally, it describes the meaning domain on the basis of an attribute-listing survey.Chapter 5 attempts to explore the preservation mechanism. By comparing preserving ABB color adjectives in modern Chinese to dead ones in history, it concludes four tendentious factors to the remaining of ABB-type color adjectives, which concerns the basic color category, semantic definition of BB, semantic relationship between A and BB, and familiarity of BB.Chapter 6 is the summarization. It generalises main conclusions and values of this paper, points out some deficiencies and makes a prospect of future study as well.