Construction Of Lexical-semantic Networks Of Loan Prefixoids In Chinese-English Learner’s Dictionaries

The language contact among various cultures has effectively contributed to the advent of loan words and morphemes,enriching the Chinese lexical stock.By way of transliteration,liberal translation and other methods,several foreign morphemes have evolved into loan prefixoids through reduction of original morphosemantic features and POS shifts.These loan prefixoids have been widely applied because of their strong capacity in word-formation,generating a considerable number of neologisms.The loan prefixoid is also known for the representativeness and practicability even though the number of items in this category is relatively small.Loan prefixoids came into being as a result of the impact of acculturation on Chinese word-formation,and the knowledge of this fact may in turn assist CFL learners to realize sufficient input of vocabulary knowledge in TCFL.Similar to other affixoids,the loan prefixoids are shifting elements between roots and prefixes,with the characteristics of fixed position,generalized meaning and high productivity.There are synonymous,antonymous and other relations among loan prefixoids and their word cluster members,which leads to the possibility of forming certain lexical-semantic networks.In the circumstances,as a most important tool for CFL learners to learn Chinese,it is essential to provide word-formation and lexical-semantic information of loan prefixoids in CELDs to accelerate CFL learners’ understanding of the word-formative mechanism of Chinese morphemes.The present study investigates the formation and evolution of loan prefixoids via contrast analysis,semantic componential analysis and other approaches.It is shown that transliteration,pictographic translation,literal translation and liberal translation are commonly-used transformative methods during the process,in which a salient trend is to form monosyllabic loan prefixoids.Besides,the POS properties of foreign morphemes in the source languages and as loan prefixoids in Chinese are unsymmetrical;Moreover,the evolution into loan prefixoids is a dynamic process,implying that the developmental levels among different loan prefixoids are imbalanced.Furthermore,language contact and language development mechanism contribute significantly to the formation and evolution of loan prefixoids.To uncover the lexical-semantic relevance among loan prefixoids and their word cluster members,the present study conducts a corpus-based lexical-semantic analysis over six typical research objects via abstracting and comparing data from BCC and CCCL.It can be concluded that loan prefixoids possess certain combination preference in terms of the POS property and the number of characters of the immediately following constituents.Compared with the original constituents,there are likely POS transformations of neologisms in word clusters.Furthermore,neologisms containing loan prefixoids are not only semantically context-dependent,they also exhibit different meanings in contexts.During the process of exploring the feasible presentation of loan prefixoids in CELDs,the investigation into learners’ acquisition of loan prefixoids is made through retrieval of the HSKDCC.The research findings indicate that foreign learners are apt to make syntactic mistakes while attaining loan prefixoids and related combinations with less transparency,showing incompetence in understanding semantic correlations comprehensively.On top of that,the sampling survey of dictionaries illustrate that ECLDs tend to employ special columns,boxes,word lists and the like to optimize the presentation,while most CELDs are concerned with the special phenomenon but inclined to highlight the lexical-semantic information in the definitions and examples,making the arrangement of loan prefixoids scattered and unsystematic in a sense.To satisfy CFL learners’ needs and better the presentation of loan prefixoids in CELDs,the present study puts forward a tentative solution based on constructing lexical-semantic networks under the guidance of Schema Theory,Category theory,and Input Processing Theory.The suggestions are made from the perspectives of microstructure,mediostructure,frame structure and macrostructure with regard to dictionary compilation.