A Multi-dimensional Study of Inverse Morpheme Words in Chinese

Abstract

As a unique linguistic phenomenon in Chinese vocabulary, inverse morpheme words originate from ancient Chinese and have evolved and are still in use today.Using the theory of "Three Plane", this paper quantitatively describes the inverse morphemes in Modern Chinese Dictionary (2005 edition) (hereafter referred to as "Modern Chinese" (the 05th edition)), and makes a corpus containing 608 pairs of inverse morpheme words, namely 1216 words. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, descriptive and explanatory methods, inductive and deductive methods, this paper tries to make a classification investigation from word structure and semantic type. From the perspective of word structure, the inverse morpheme words are dominated by homologous words, supplemented by heterologous words. In the homologous words, the juxtaposition and orthologous structures are the majority.It is found that the semantic changes of more than half of inverse morpheme words in "Modern Chinese" (the 05th edition) are affected by the morpheme order, so the formation of the meaning of modern Chinese words is related to the morpheme meaning.