A corpus study on the distribution of the denotational items of the trait class word "lǎo"

Abstract

Trait class words are one of the important words to describe the characteristics or states of people and things. As a high frequency trait class word, "lǎo" has many meanings in different contexts. Since the compilation of dictionaries needs to occupy a large amount of corpus as the premise, and the Modern Chinese Dictionary has limited grasp of corpus, there are problems in the division of meanings. This paper uses corpus technology to re-describe and classify the meanings of "lǎo" in modern Chinese in the form of case study, and analyzes the causes and derivations of the meanings of "lǎo" from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.