Semantic Structures of Chinese Disyllable New Words

This paper focuses on analyzing the semantic structure of Chinese disyllable new words. First, 19395 words are selected from several dictionaries and corpora. Then, we tagged the disyllable new words and the semantic categories of their morphemes using the system of semantic categories. We investigated the relations between the morpheme meaning and the word´s meaning, and then classified them as eight types. The characteristics of semantic word-formation of disyllable new words and phrases are as follows: (1) The eight types of the morpheme meaning and the sememes of disyllable new words have unbalanced distribution. The number of the fifth type (a+b=a+b) is the biggest. (2) The word-formation ability of every semantic category of new words and phrases is different. The class H is the most generative of word-formation, the rest categories of them are B, I, D, A, E, C, J, G, K, L. Class H has the most powerful ability of word-formation, and the rest of them are D, B, E, I, F, A, C, J, G, K. The times of each semantic category appearing on the disyllable word are different. (3) The functions of semantic word-formation rules is quite different. The abilities of HH, HD, DD are the best, and they can form the most words. (4) The structural types of new words are generally the same as that of the known words.