論縮略作為漢字語素義的演變途徑之一: 從大陸 2012 年度新詞新語談起

Chinese characters are so-called combinations of 'graph, sound and meaning'. Basically, 'graph' is the written form and 'sound' the spoken form so they both refer to forms. More importantly, Chinese characters are ideographic and the 'meaning ' refers to morphemic sense. As we all know, in real life language use, words are the basic units. Laymen are only concerned with discourse meaning, sentential meaning, and at most lexical meaning. They will not think much of morphemic senses, if at all. Since people either do not know about morphemes or care to find out about morphological principles in word formation, thus language will change unconsciously, causing characters to change their meanings in time. The reason for that is we use language in different contexts making use of existing words and coining new ones, thus causing changes in morphemic senses. For instance, we all know a tax payer (納稅人) is someone who pays taxes. But for most words that contain the character '納' , the morpheme sense is 'to accept', eg 'to enjoy the cool' (納涼), 'to accept' (接納), 'to receive' (收納), 'to receive happily' (笑納), 'to take in a concubine' (納妾)、'to accommodate' (容納), 'to absorb' (吸納), 'teller' (出納員). So where did the new morphemic sense of 'to pay' come from which is just the opposite? Surely we can argue that '繳納' has an antonymic conjoined structure, and the sense of 'to pay' (納) was finally lost, as in the word '人馬' (literally man and horse) which no longer conveys the meaning of 'horse' (馬). However, why does the word '納稅人' make use of the character '納' 'to accept' instead of '繳' (to pay). Or is it simply a case of mistranslation? Nevertheless, the language has been changed accordingly. To cite another example, in Taiwan there is a new word '陸妻' that is used to refer to 'a mainland wife' or 'a new immigrant wife from mainland China'. The morphemic sense of (陸) has narrowed down from 'land' to 'continent' to 'continental China'. The sense has been narrowing down and the reference is getting more specific. You will not call a wife from the US '陸妻' even though she is from the American continent, not from Hawaii. Moreover, this morphemic sense is productive, and they have derived a new word '陸生', meaning 'students from mainland China'. This paper will discuss the changes in morphemic sense through the study of new words and expressions in mainland in 2012, and how we can make use of such etymological knowledge to improve lexicography, so as to promote better acquisition of meanings of Chinese characters.