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Workshop on Chinese Lexical Semantics

CLSW 2016: Chinese Lexical Semantics pp 588–599Cite as

Constructional Coercion in the Evolution of Contemporary Chinese Morphemes—Taking “Fen”(粉) as an Example

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10085))

Abstract

In contemporary Chinese, morphemes are changing with the development of vocabulary. During the evolution of morphemes, constructional coercion has played an important role. It is a mechanism to adjust semantic conflict and type mismatch, and will sometimes cause the change of meaning in the component of the construction. Chinese morpheme “fen”(Chinese character “粉”)has evolved from a meaningless transliterated syllable to a nominal morpheme and then a verb to express events, which is a semantical evolution chain from specific to abstract, and from special indication to general reference. Constructional coercion has played a vital role in the process. This paper takes the new Chinese morpheme “fen(粉)” as an example in order to analysis and explain the reason of its evolution using the theory of constructional coercion on the bases of a clear semantical evolutional trace of “fen(粉)”.

This paper is funded by Ministry of Education’s humanities & social sciences research program “A Study of the Forming and Evolution of Chinese Morphemes Based on Quantitative Analysis”(11YJC740146) and Social Science Planning Study Program of Shandong Province(10DWXJ05).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of International Education and Exchange, University of Jinan, Jinan, 250022, China

    Xiaoping Zhang

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  1. Xiaoping Zhang
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Correspondence to Xiaoping Zhang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Infocomm Research , Singapore, Singapore

    Minghui Dong

  2. Nanyang Technological University , Singapore, Singapore

    Jingxia Lin

  3. Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

    Xuri Tang

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Zhang, X. (2016). Constructional Coercion in the Evolution of Contemporary Chinese Morphemes—Taking “Fen”(粉) as an Example. In: Dong, M., Lin, J., Tang, X. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10085. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49508-8_54

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49508-8_54

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49507-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49508-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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