| Recent years have witnessed the popularity of newly-developing word clusters,such as "-gou~3" , "-men~2" , "wei~1-" and "luo~3-" with the development of computers and network.These lexical morphemes originate from either one part of compound constituents or free lexemes,appearing in a fixed position,mostly "-X" or "X-" ,with certain but not totally bleached meaning in a number of complex words.Because their form and meaning are gradually emerging with more and more words of the same type being created and used,this study defines them as emerging affixes,quoted from Shao Bin‘s doctoral dissertation in 2015.However,there is yet no consensus on whether these complex words are compounds or derivations.Traditional Morphology and currently prevailing Distributed Morphology take compounds and derivations apart on account of different ways of word-formation.However,drawing a sharp boundary between compounds and derivations for Chinese has proven difficult for the reason that there are indeed many items which possess derivation-like features.Morphological theories based on morpheme as their analytical unit lead to inadequate explanations for some distinctive phenomena in Chinese word formation.However, "construction" can be adopted into the phonological,morphological and semantic analyses of words and complex words can be interpreted as a whole from top to bottom in light of the distinguished characteristics of Modern Chinese.In addition,scholars at home mainly pay close heed to the study of argument structure,but studies on the aspect of words have not attracted enough attention since the establishment of Construction Grammar.Therefore,this study tries to conduct a construction morphological analysis of the emerging affixes in Modern Chinese and puts forward the following questions:1)How many types of emerging affixes are there in Modern Chinese?What are their distinctive features?2)What are the classifications and evolutionary processes of "-gou~3" and "wei~1-" construction?3)How can the morphological schemas of "-gou~3" and "wei~1-" be represented in Construction Morphology?Why are these two constructions so productive?Based on above statements,this thesis employs Booij‘s Construction Morphology(2010)as the theoretical framework and carries out a detailed study on construction meanings and morphological schemas of new cyber words in Modern Chinese taking the popular and highly productive "-gou~3" ,a typical quasi-suffix and "wei~1-" ,a representative secreted prefix as exemplars.164 "-gou~3" and 197 "wei~1-" are collected from the instances of previous studies and Sougou,a comprehensive search engine in China by making use of Python Reptile and Jieba(Chinese for "to stutter" )Chinese text segmentation.This thesis firstly makes some classifications on "-gou~3" and "wei~1-" word clusters by representing some tables to find out their features of word-formation.Then,the study compares them with "-gou~3" and "wei~1-" in Peking University CCL Corpus and explicates their meanings with the aid of three Chinese dictionaries to observe the changes of their semantic meanings and emotional color.Finally,their construction meanings and morphological schemas are analyzed from a new morphological theory-Construction Morphology based on the concrete examples of "-gou~3" and "wei~1-" and cognitive construal is analyzed from Construction Grammar.This thesis claims that there exist two kinds of emerging affixes-quasi affix and secreted affix in Modern Chinese.The author finds out that new cyber words "-gou~3" in our daily life are mainly no more negative,most of which are neutral or even positive.Their construction meanings are a kind of pet name,indicating people‘s close relationship,or a kind of self-mockery of someone in some kind of state for a long time,or a satire on those people with despicable behaviors.While,new cyber words "wei~1-" are no more "tiny or small" in the high-tech realm,most of which are closely connected with Network.The core idea of Construction Morphology inherits from the holistic view of Construction Grammar.From the perspective of Construction,words can be regarded as a kind of construction,and word construction is a synthesis of three kinds of information-PHON,SYN and SEM.Constructions can be understood as blueprints for the coinage and interpretation of words,and any non-compositional property of a set of complex words is assigned to the construction itself.This paper is an attempt at the application of Construction Morphology in Chinese facts.The author hopes that on the one hand this study can enrich its analysis of Chinese facts,and on the other hand,it will contribute to offering a new way to interpret the internal structure of new cyber words in Chinese,conducing to a better understanding of the "mistreated" category of word formation in Modern Chinese.What is more,to some extent,it can also enrich the application of Construction Grammar in Chinese vocabularies.Last but not least,the author hopes that this thesis can provide some enlightenment about the updating of entries about new cyber words in the dictionaries and make for the spread of the Netspeak,especially those neologies in Chinese. |
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