earticle

영어

This study focused on the decreasing trend of neutral tone words in the popular vocabulary of Mandarin and the standardization of these words to non-neutral tone words. Thus, based on the routine lexical syllabus from 1990s to the present for each period, we explored the aspect and the status of the formation of neutral tone words in Mandarin. First of all, for the lexical classification syllabus(1992) and New HSK lexical syllabus(2009, 2015) which have not been dealt with in the previous research, we investigated the aspect of standardization of neutral tone words. Next, focusing on the two-syllable neutral tone words of the lexical syllabus, we checked the present use against the modern Chinese dictionaries. Through a precise quantitative analysis, the following results were obtained. First, as for the beginners' levels of 1 and 2, the distribution of the neutral tone words was high. Second, through the common-used lexical syllabus, the neutral tone words became normative from irregular patterns to regular ones. Third, on the basis of the contrastive analysis with modern Chinese dictionaries, we can generally conclude that the current state of normality could be considered as the process of 'neutral tone words →optional neutral tone words→non neutral tone words.