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The Development Trend and Form-Meaning Features of Contemporary Chinese Lexical Patterns

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2021)

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Abstract

Based on the investigation of the Chinese New Words, this article analyzes the development trend and form-meaning features of contemporary Chinese lexical patterns from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Quantitative research found that the number of words of contemporary Chinese lexical patterns first increases and then decreases from 2006 to 2018. Some lexical patterns had explosive productivity in a short period of time. The 2 + 1VN mode has the strongest productivity and preponderant word-formation mode of each lexical pattern is different. Qualitative research found that contemporary Chinese lexical patterns are represented by three-syllable patterns in prosody. In terms of grammatical function, the relation between components in the NN are mostly thematic relations, only some of them share property relations. The prosodic modes of structures such as VN, AN, and AV are inconsistent with the mainstream rules of traditional word formation, which is due to the weak motility of V and the classification function of A. The study of form-meaning features of lexical patterns is helpful to reveal the new features of contemporary Chinese vocabulary and deepen the study of the evolution of Chinese vocabulary.

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Funding

Science Foundation of Beijing Language and Culture University (supported by ‘the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities’) (21YJ030002); Humanities and Social Sciences Planning Fund of the Ministry of Education of China (20YJA740032); The Phoenix Tree Innovation Platform Project (supported by ‘the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities’) (20PT01).

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Correspondence to Jiapan Li .

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Li, J. (2022). The Development Trend and Form-Meaning Features of Contemporary Chinese Lexical Patterns. In: Dong, M., Gu, Y., Hong, JF. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13249. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06703-7_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06703-7_30

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06702-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06703-7

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