An Empirical Study On Word Class Labeling Of "X 演" Lexemes In Chinese-English Dictionaries

The research on the categorization of word classes has long been a contentious and perplexing problem in linguistic studies and has been referred to as the study of“God particles” in languages.In the grammatical analyses of analytic languages such as Modern Chinese,the issue of word class has always been an intractable problem.The problem of word classes has a massive effect on both the macrostructure and microstructure of dictionaries,and the confusion existing on this problem results in many discrepancies and contradictions in both Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries.Though scholars have made some progress in resolving this problem,it remains a difficult and unsolvable one.In view of this,driven by the Two-Level Word Class Categorization Theory,this thesis the “X 演” disyllabic lexemes in four authoritative Chinese-English dictionaries as the research objects,and conduct an empirical research on their word class labeling in dictionaries.Simultaneously,surveys of usage patterns based on large-scale corpora are also performed in this thesis in order to evaluate the word class categories for these“X 演” lexemes.The findings of this thesis are as follows:(1)the majority of “X 演”disyllabic lexemes in Chinese-English dictionaries are labeled as verbs(accounting for66.67% to 88.89% in each dictionary),and the number of multi-category lexemes is small(accounting for 7.41% to 18.52% in each dictionary),with a large number of these lexemes are inconsistent in their word class labeling with the four Chinese-English dictionaries(taking up a percentage of 40.74%);(2)though the treatment of these lexemes has mostly followed “the principle of translating by word classes”,there are still few violations;(3)after the investigation of usage patterns based on corpora,it is found the multi-category lexemes of “X 演” account for 59.26%,and the multi-class membership of the lexemes is positively correlated with their lexemes.This study shows that the word class labeling of “X 演” disyllabic lexemes in Chinese-English dictionaries makes reference to the Chinese dictionaries,and is mainly based on the semantic criterion.Moreover,the treatment of multi-category lexemes follows the principle of parsimony,with the importance of usage patterns surveys based on corpora being neglected.By investigating the word class labeling conditions of “X 演” disyllabic lexemes in Chinese-English dictionaries,this thesis contributes to improving the compilation quality for these Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries,and intensifies the studies on word classes in Chinese-foreign language dictionaries.