Competition and Differentiation of a Pair of Morpheme-inverted Words in Mandarin Chinese: Dòuzhēng and Zhēngdòu

Abstract

A large number of morpheme-inverted words are unique elements in Chinese vocabulary, which is an important lexical phenomenon occurred in the history of the development and evolution of Chinese vocabulary. As a corpus driven study, this paper discusses a pair of morpheme-inverted words dòuzhēng and zhēngdòu from microscopic perspective. Based on the statis-tics and analysis, this paper explores the origin, occurrence time, evolution pro-cess, service conditions and the reasons of semantic changes of dòuzhēng and zhēngdòu. And this study aims at providing some reference for the study of morpheme-inverted words from microscopic perspective.