A Comparative Study On English And Chinese NV Compounds From The Perspective Of Parallel Architecture

Compounding is one of the main ways of word formation in English and Chinese.In English and Chinese,the number of noun-verb compounds is large and their semantics are complex.Chinese and foreign scholars have studied them from the perspectives of motives for word formation,morpheme selection,syntactic structure,semantic relations and cognition,but few studies have systematically compared English and Chinese NV compounds.Jackendoff’s theory of Parallel Architecture is based on morphology and cognitive linguistics,and is able to reveal the relationship between form and meaning of language by sketching the semantic structure within compounds with schema.This thesis adopts the large-scale corpus,in which Chinese data are based on Modern Chinese Dictionary(7^thEdition)and English data are based on the CELEX corpus with a reference to Oxford English Dictionary（2003）,applying data analysis and quantitative statistics,and taking Parallel Architecture as the theoretical foundation to comprehensively analyze the morphological and semantic interaction of NV compounds in English and Chinese.It analyzes the similarities and differences,with the purpose of revealing their mechanism of word formation.The main findings of this study are as follows:（1）in terms of syntax,NV compounds in both languages have subject-predicate,modifier-head and verb-object structures,with the highest proportion of modifier-head structures,the lowest proportion of subject-predicate ones in English,and of verb-object ones in Chinese;（2）in light of word class,there are nouns,verbs and adjectives both in English and Chinese,where verbs occupy the highest proportion while adjectives the lowest;（3）in the aspect of morpheme selection,N in both English and Chinese NV compounds fall into 8 semantic categories,including places,directions,time,tools,body parts,names of people,of animals and plants,inanimate things in the nature,and abstract nouns;there are mainly 3 semantic categories of V in English,including verbs that state actions,social activities,and changes of state;4 semantic categories of V are found in Chinese,including actions,mental activities,social activities,and changes of state;（4）as for semantic relations,their internal semantic relations are quite similar,with differences in several subcategories.There are mainly 5,15 and 7 kinds of semantic relations within the NV compounds of English subject-predicate,modifier-head and verb-object structures;while in Chinese,6,14 and 6 kinds can be subdivided in the three syntactic structures,respectively.