A Contrastive Study Of The Word Class Categorization Of Chinese And English Social Interaction Entries

Word class categorization is still a hot and difficult issue in analytic languages.The most controversial issue is the handling of multiple class membership.Modern Chinese is a typical analytical language,and the most controversial problem in academic circles is how to deal with the multifunctionality of it.Social interaction words,defined as the words describing the human transmission of information,exchange of ideas and other social activities,featuring large quantity,high frequency in daily communication and complicated word classes.From the perspective of Language as a Complex Adaptive System,this thesis explored the word class labeling of social interaction entries in English and Chinese dictionaries.Based on the Modern Chinese Corpus of the Center for Chinese Linguistics（CCL Corpus）,Corpus of Contemporary American English（COCA）and DIY data of various dictionaries,we studied the word class labeling of social interaction entries in Chinese and English dictionaries from the perspective of the Two-level Word Class Categorization Theory and conducted some case studies.It is found that of 1219 social interaction entries in The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary(7^th edition),87 of them are labeled as two-category entries（7.14%）.Of854 social interaction entries in Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary(9^th edition),262 are labeled as multi-category entries（30.68%）,and there are various types of multi-category.According to the research,the word class labeling of social interaction entries in the English dictionary generally agrees with their usages in the English language community,whereas the word class labeling of them in Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries goes against their usages in the Chinese language community.We believe that most of the social interaction entries in Chinese are multi-category entries.We conclude that the reasons bringing about the inconsistency between the actual usages of social interaction entries and their word class labeling in Chinese are as follows:（1）The misleading of the semantic criterion of word class identification;（2）The misleading of the“Principle of Parsimony”;（3）The unawareness of the word class categorization happens at the langue level and the parole level;（4）The inadequacy of employing corpus research methods.The research can not only deepen English and Chinese word class research but also be useful to improve word class labeling of Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries.