Lexicology (Revised Edition)

Author: Zhang Zhiyi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-08-01
Features: The study of word meaning has a long history in China. Due to the core of traditional culture being Confucianism, the explanation of word meaning primarily focused on interpreting classics. Annotations and commentaries often discussed meanings based on specific texts, inevitably leading to biased and incomplete understanding, which naturally hindered the formation of a systematic approach. There are many systems within language, and the system of word meaning is one of them. An analysis of language systems often employs a common method: classifying language units into several subcategories while segmenting language structures into parts, and identifying corresponding relationships between them. For example, in grammatical analysis, words are distinguished as nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., and sentences are segmented into subjects, predicates, and objects. On this basis, the relationship between word classes and sentence components is explained. Similarly, in the analysis of Chinese syllables, phonemes are first categorized into vowels and consonants, syllables are segmented into initials and finals, and further divided into initial, main vowel, and final components. On this basis, the relationship between vowels, consonants, and initials-finals is explained. This method has also been used to analyze the structure of words. For instance, morphemes are categorized into semantic morphemes and non-semantic morphemes, words are segmented into roots and affixes, and then their combinatorial relationships are explained. Can this method be applied to the analysis of the word meaning system? A linguist named A. Cruse from the UK attempted this approach. He distinguished words representing superordinate concepts from those representing subordinate concepts, segmented words representing whole concepts into those representing parts, and then explored the corresponding relationships. His attempt was not successful, and Professor Liu Shuxin has made insightful remarks on this topic. What I want to say is, why cannot the traditional descriptive method be used for the word meaning system? This is because, first, determining the structural units of word meaning is a highly complex issue. Second, the relationships between word meanings are intricate and cannot be fully summarized by simply using superordinate-subordinate and whole-part relationships. However, the basic idea of Cruse's "Lexical Semantics" is commendable. Studying word meaning from the perspective of lexical semantics, viewing it as a system, and analyzing it from multiple angles is a largely unexplored field for Chinese. This field must be cultivated, but those undertaking this work must meet several conditions. First, they must have long been engaged in the study of word meaning, accumulating extensive materials. Second, they must be familiar with relevant theories and methods of lexical semantics, able to discern their strengths and weaknesses. Third, they must be able to analyze the relationships between Chinese word meanings from multiple perspectives and begin systematic description. Among the Chinese linguists I know, Professor Zhang Zhiyi and his wife, Professor Zhang Qingyun, meet these conditions.