摘要
此前对汉语动名词类范畴演变的研究初步指出,现代汉语的名词类在扩大,但这一假设缺乏有力的实证证据.基于双层词类范畴化理论,借助自建的一亿字现代汉语历时语料库对现代汉语动名兼类现象进行考察,可以发现,动名词类范畴在百年间并非一成不变,而是动态发展的;现代汉语动名词类范畴边界渗透性总体显著上升,动名范畴边界越来越柔性,其直接动因是动词转名词用法的增加,这从历时视角为当前学界的汉语动名兼类分歧提供了实证的解决方案.从基于使用的视角来看,词类可视为动态的自适应系统,个体词词类的临时创新用法经过反复使用逐渐固化和规约化,最终成为社群语言系统中稳定的概括词词类用法.
Abstract
The word classes and their heterosemy in modern Chinese are more intricate than those in Indo-European languages,due to the lack of morphological markers in Chinese.This complexity has led to extensive debates and brought forth multiple opinions,such as the"no fixed word classes"view,the"fixed word classes"view,the continuous view of word classes,and the"verbs-as-nouns"view.The issue of verb/noun heterosemy has particularly baffled the academic community.The"fixed word classes"view argues that heterosemy should be minimized and therefore pays insufficient attention to the nominal use of verbs,while the"verbs-as-nouns"view considers verbs as a subcategory of nouns,thus denying the existence of verb/noun heterosemy.Furthermore,few studies have examined the diachronic change in verb/noun heterosemy in modern Chinese from a usage-based perspective.This paper aims to uncover whether the boundary between verb and noun categories of verb/noun heterosemous words has changed in modern Chinese over the past century.If so,to what extent has it evolved?Is there any underlying regularity in the diachronic change of verb/noun heterosemy?Based on the Two-level Word Class Categorization Theory,using a self-built one-hundred-million-character diachronic corpus of modern Chinese and the concept of"boundary permeability"from the field of linguistic typology,this paper empirically examines the verb/noun category change in modern Chinese.This corpus encompasses newspaper,fiction,and non-fiction texts from 1920 to 2019,and it is balanced in terms of genres and decades.It also employs the Hanlp toolkit in Python for word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging.To examine the change in the boundary between verb and noun categories,the paper first selected about 1,400 Chinese verb/noun heterosemous words and extracted their frequency data in ten decades using R,followed by the calculation of the boundary permeability index and the noun proportion.Finally,the mean permeability index for each decade was used to describe the overall trend of boundary permeability change,and the time-series clustering analysis was adopted to explore and visualize the change patterns.The findings suggest a significant overall increase in the verb/noun boundary permeability in modern Chinese,which can be directly attributed to the rise of verb-to-noun conversion over the past century.Given that language constitutes a dynamic and complex adaptive system,word classes can also be deemed dynamic adaptive systems and thus can be examined from the usage-based perspective and using the probability-based approach.As to the essence of word class and heterosemy,we support the two-level word class categorization theory and propose that the class1 of a word must be determined according to its position or syntactic function in a sentence,but the class2 of a word can be heterosemous independently of syntactic context.The"class1"refers to the specific class of a word token in a particular sentence,while the"class2"denotes the abstract generalized class of a word type.Importantly,the class1 of word token tends to be temporary and creative,and it can be gradually entrenched and conventionalized to be the class2 of word type and incorporated into the lexicon of a speech community.The innovations of this study can be found in the following aspects.Firstly,it adopts the usage-based perspective and performs a corpus-based analysis of the verb and noun categories,instead of the qualitative intuition-based analyses that prevail in previous research.Secondly,against the backdrop of ample synchronic studies on word classes,this study focuses on the diachronic change of verb and noun categories and seeks to verify Chen's hypothesis regarding the expansion of the noun class in modern Chinese.In addition,the regular patterns behind the word class change have been clarified,based on our empirical findings and the Two-level Word Class Categorization Theory.Thirdly,although the continuous view of word class has received considerable support,few studies have quantitatively assessed the degree of verb-to-noun conversion or verb/noun heterosemy.This study addresses this issue by calculating the boundary permeability index.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据