An Empirical Study On Word Class Labeling Of Emotion Lexemes In New Century Chinese-English Dictionary (2^nd Edition)

Word class categorization is considered as the study of “God particles” of languages.The lack of morphological changes in Chinese makes studies on word classes in Modern Chinese a knotty and tricky problem,especially the treatment of heterosemy/multifunctionality of lexemes.All of these problems make the word class labeling a conundrum in Chinese-foreign language dictionaries,especially Chinese-English dictionaries.Besides,the word class labeling has great impact on the macro-structure and micro-structure in lexicography especially the senses,definitions and examples in the micro-structure.Great achievements have been made by many scholars on studies of Chinese-English dictionaries,yet word class labeling is still a tough issue.Emotion words,defined as the words expressing mental states and mental activities in terms of meaning,are crucial and central to human life so that they own three characteristics: large quantity,high frequency in daily communication and complicated word classes.Hence,there are always some confusions on the word class labeling of emotion lexemes in dictionaries.Under the guidance of Two-level Word Class Categorization Theory,this study chooses basic emotion lexemes from four basic categories in authentic New Century Chinese-English Dictionary(2nd edition)as the research objects to analyze their word class labelings on the basis of large-scale balanced corpora and self-established databases.Meanwhile,this thesis makes a comparison with other Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries diachronically and synchronically to find out the potential problems.Besides,usage-pattern investigations based on corpora are conducted to identify the word class categorization of those basic emotion lexemes.It is found that some problems exist: in 206 lexemes,179 basic emotion lexemes are treated as single-category,which takes up 86.89%,including 122 adjectives(59.22%)and 52 verbs(25.24%).While only 27 lexemes are treated as multi-category,taking up just 13.11%.However,with the help of the corpora,it is found that the result was far different: the majority of lexemes are labeled as multiple class membership,which takes up 70.39%.It shows that the word class labelings of basic emotion lexemes in the New Century Chinese-English Dictionary(2nd edition)do not match with the results of corpus-based pattern surveys,which deviates from the nature of language as a complex system,and obey the traditional point of view that C-E dictionaries resort Chinese dictionaries as blue-print to identify the word class rather than apply the corpus-based method in practice.This thesis adopts a new theoretical perspective and makes an empirical study on the word class labeling of basic emotion lexemes in New Century Chinese-English Dictionary(2nd edition).It is proved that the word class labelings of emotion lexemes in Chinese-English dictionaries should follow accurate criteria and procedures for classification,and consider the levels of langue and parole,then base on large-scale balanced corpora for the analysis of the conventionalized propositional speech act function(s)to define their word classes.Thus,this study not only sheds light on Chinese-English dictionary compilation but also deepens the ontological studies on Modern Chinese grammar.