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Published in:
2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Constructional Coercion in the Evolution of Contemporary Chinese Morphemes—Taking “Fen”(粉) as an Example
Author : Xiaoping Zhang
Published in: Chinese Lexical Semantics
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
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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)”.