Function Research On The Two-syllable "N+A"-type Color Wordsin Modern Chinese

There is a big controversy of the two-syllable "N+A"-type color words’ definition and internal parts of speech such as"snow-white, pitch-black and grass-green".Therefore, we delicately discuss the form, structure relations, syntactic distribution and presentation function of these words from multiple levels.This paper is divided into the following 5 chapters:The first chapter is an introduction.It summarizes the former study on the two-syllable "N+A"-type color words in modern Chinese, which includes internal structure relations, grammatical function, semantic and cognitive research findings. Then we point out the shortcomings of existing research and introduce the content and methods of this paper, as well as the source of the corpus.The second chapter is the definition of the two-syllable "N+A"-type color words.First of all, we analyze the morpheme from the formal structure, to determine the nature of anterior morpheme N and posterior morpheme A.Then we discriminate the internal structure relations of "N (object morpheme)+A (color morpheme)".Finally, we set the object of this research.The third chapter is about predication function. We set multiple parameters of vocabulary and grammar to investigate the overall function of two-syllable color words comprehensively, finding that the difference is mainly reflected in the predication and modification function. This chapter we put emphasis on the presentation function, finding that there is a gradation sequence in the predicate of capability and flexibility.The fourth chapter is about modification function. We focus on the modification function of the two-syllable "N+A"-type color words and find that the difference is mainly reflected in two aspects:one attribute is if it need the attributive marker of "de", another is if it can modify the morpheme "color" directly. There is a prototype sequence in the interior of the two-syllable color words.The differences in predication and modification function can be explained by the association between presentation function, syntactic elements and part of speech in typological perspective.The last chapter is the conclusion. We summarize the content of this research and point out potential shortages and problems for future research.