| 英文摘要 |
Semantic radicals serve as important clues for character meaning judgment. Meanwhile, semantic radicals and their derived characters form a rich and complicated semantic network vital for analyzing character construction as well as for character recognition and Chinese reading. This paper investigates the semantic network of the five high-frequency semantic radicals:‘cao’,‘mu’,‘zhu’,‘kou’, and‘yan’. We first examined the relationship between the semantic radical and its derived characters; categorized and counted the characters, and identified core features based on the categorical structure. The findings showed: (1) the semantic network of characters with the radical‘cao’featured plant names;‘mu’characters focused on wooden objects and plant names;‘zhu’characters were mainly about bamboo products. (2) Characters adopting radical‘kou’mostly referred to oral actions, while the‘yan’characters primarily denoted verbal or speech-related acts. The overlapped category of radical‘kou’and‘yan’was speech. (3) According to the quantity of characters, the plant-related radicals were primarily centered on the object aspect in qualia structure (e.g., constitutive, telic, and agentive from Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon Theory).‘Kou’and‘yan’mostly revealed the process in the event structure. It was shown that the core meaning of the semantic radical constrains aspects revealed by the derived characters. The semantic networks and core features proposed in this study incorporate the semantic relationships between semantic radicals and derived characters. By integrating the framework of categorization with the organization of core semantic features, this approach can enhance the effectiveness of Chinese character instruction. |