Abstract:

In writing a Chinese-English pedagogical dictionary with the smallest meaningful units as heads of its main entries, we face a problem-how to name this dictionary in Chinese. It has multi-character morphemes as heads of main entries, leaving no place for their meaningless components. A dictionary of words usually has words rather than non-words as heads of its main entries, whereas many of the head characters in this new dictionary are not words. Strictly speaking, this kind of dictionaries should be called a dictionary of morphemes, yet there is no such term in Chinese. This article re-examines the relationship among morphemes, lexemes, and graphemes, redefines the various terms that are related to the smallest meaningful unit in Chinese, and proposes to term this unit “ciwei” (辞位), the study of lexes and vocabulary “cihuixue”(辞汇学), and the study of Chinese dictionaries “cidianxue” (辞典学).

Key words: character, word, morpheme, lexeme, dictionary of characters, dictionary of words, dictionary of lexemes, lexicography