Word Class Labelling Of Monosyllabic Body-part Lexemes In The New Century Chinese-English Dictionary(2^nd Edition)

Lexical categorization of analytic languages remains a hot and tricky topic attracting heated discussions by scholars.As a typical analytic language,Modern Chinese is a frontier of lexical categorization issues,especially the criteria for word class distinction and the handling of heterosemy.Disputes over word class issues lead to problems of word class labelling in dictionaries.With polysemy and syntactic multifunctionality,monosyllabic body-part words also face such problems,which affect the quality of dictionaries to a certain extent.The thesis intends to take monosyllabic body-part lexemes as an example to discuss the criteria of the New Century Chinese-English Dictionary(2^nd Edition)（NCCED2）for word class labelling,and whether there is any room for improvement based on the criteria.Based on the Two-level Word Class Categorization Theory,the thesis investigates the word class labelling of monosyllabic body-part lexemes in the NCCED2,and their usage patterns in corpora.The results of the study show that the information on word class labelling of monosyllabic body-part lexemes in the NCCED2 is contradictory to the results of corpus-based usage pattern survey.Reasons for the contradiction are as follows:the theories for dictionary compilation fail to distinguish two levels of lexical categorization at langue and parole;the dictionary compilation is affected by the“Principle of Parsimony”to a certain extent;existing criteria for distinguishing the usages of monosyllabic body-part words as temporary and regular quantifiers have yet to be improved,and the dictionary does not strictly differ morphemes from words.The thesis thus suggests the adoption of the four criteria under the Two-level Word Class Categorization Theory,namely token frequency,type frequency,time span and register variation,for measuring the conventionalization of a word’s usage with the help of large-scale balanced corpora,so as to further distinguish and label word classes.The study can help improve the word class labelling of monosyllabic body-part lexemes in Chinese-English dictionaries so as to improve the quality of dictionaries;deepen the studies of word class issues in Modern Chinese;promote teaching Chinese as a foreign language.