Contagion and Ellipsis (in Chinese)

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the process of two kinds of word meaning generating, namely “contagion” and “ellipsis”. The former (“contagion”) is generally regarded as an important way for Chinese words to acquire new meanings, while the latter (“ellipsis”) is rarely mentioned in the literature. This paper proves that the real cases of “contagion” in the evolution of Chinese word meaning are very rare, and most of the cases that have been identified as “contagion” in the past are not “contagion”, but “ellipsis”, which is actually a common way for human language to acquire new meaning.