| Although the study of word classes has lasted at least two thousand years,it is still a highlighted issue in present-day linguistics in that the nature of word classes and the criteria for word class categorization still remain controversial.As a typical analytic language,it is difficult in word class identification of Modern Chinese for lacking of morphological changes,especially in the treatment of heterosemy or multiple class membership.When it comes to the practical employment,theoretical divergence is reflected in the inconsistent word class labeling among bilingual dictionaries.What’s worse,it also has negative impact in the setting of English equivalents and Chinese examples.Many achievements have been made among nouns,verbs and adjectives,especially N-V and N-A lexemes,whereas V-A lexmes fail to get enough attention.Thus,this thesis is intended to conduct an empirical study concerning V-A lexemes based on New Century Chinese-English Dictionary(2nd edition)and Chinese-English Translation Dictionary from the perspective of the Two-level Word Class Categorization TheoryIt is found that over 80%of the targeted lexemes are inconsistently labeled with their word class information.After roughly comparing the inconsistent situation,we find that the lexemes labeled with verb and adjective classes in one of the two dictionaries but as verbs or adjectives in the other dictionary are both higher than 65%in the two dictionaries.This inconsistency not only appears in the word class labeling of the same lexemes in different dictionaries but also appears in that of symmetrical lexemes in the same dictionary.Then a case study on psychological lexemes is conducted as an example to illustrate the detailed process of identifying word classes.It is found that there is a confusion between the word class categorization at two levels in the treatment of multi-category lexemes in the two dictionaries.Under the influence of Chinese dictionaries,they also accepted the"Principle of Parsimony" rather than investigate the authentic usage patterns of these lexemes in large-scaled balanced CorporaDifferent from previous studies,this thesis adopts a new perspective and makes an empirical study on the word class labeling of V-A lexemes in NCCED2 and CETD.It not only shows the problem existing in the selected dictionaries but also proves the importance of an accurate criterion and a corpus-based method.This study would help to improve the compilation quality of Chinese-English dictionaries and deepen the studies on Modern Chinese word classes. |
