This thesis examines characters in Chinese and Japanese, including semantic shift. The writing system in China, Japan and a number of other nations whose script relates to characters, notably Korea, will also be discussed. By examining this "Character Cultural Sphere" in East Asia along with the historical and modern character standardizations and reformations, the role of Chinese characters proves to be essential. Furthermore, the thesis investigates semantic shifts of characters as windows on socio-cultural change in two given areas, namely "disorder" to "order" and "natural" to "artificial, manmade". One major aim is to explore shifts of meanings (semantic shifts), that can provide a commentary on the changes in societal and cultural values. The results reveal that the pattern of semantic shifts between China and Japan is considerably similar. Regarding "natural vs manmade" the overall trend shows that in both China and Japan, more characters acquired the meaning of "artificial, manmade" as time goes by, reflecting the changes in society. Regarding "disorder vs order", while the percentage of characters relating to "disorder" remained relatively stable in these two countries, the percentage of characters relating to "order" saw an undeniable increase - more than double in both Chinese and Japanese - showing that in both countries, the overall societal trend was obviously towards more "order" while "disorder" continues to exist. These results give quantitative data regarding the pattern of evolution of Chinese and Japanese societies, particularly Chinese, and provided an insight through written scripts into the evolution of human beings and civilizations. Also, because of its length, the main database of the research, the table of 2,500 common-use characters with commentary, is attached after the bibliography as an appendix.

Lexical typological studies examine how various languages express similar concepts. Previous research has discussed how the concept of moment is encoded lexically in English, Ancient Greek, and Ancient Egyptian. However, there are no cross-linguistic studies to date that collect data on the lexical expressions associated with the concept of moment. Apart from documenting expressions encoding the concept in various languages, I determine the morphosyntactic status of the collected expressions, analyze the contexts in which they are used, and identify the conceptual sources that the expressions are related to. The data is collected from a convenience sample of 37 mostly unrelated languages using a multiparallel Bible corpus, lexicons, reference grammars, and etymological dictionaries. An expression was found in 27 of the 37 languages. About 74% of the expressions (20 of 27) were used to create temporal adjuncts via affixation of locative case markers and collocation with adpositions. About 41% of the expressions (11 of 27) displayed conceptual sources pertaining to the cognitive domain TIME, while about 30% (8 of 27) were related to VISION. The study contributes to our knowledge of how abstract temporal concepts are expressed lexically. / Studier inom lexikal typologi utforskar hur olika språk uttrycker liknande koncept. Tidigare forskning inom området har behandlat hur ett ögonblick som koncept uttrycks på engelska, forngrekiska, och fornegyptiska. Däremot finns hittills inga typologiska studier som samlar data kring lexikala uttryck för konceptet ögonblick. Syftet med denna studie är att dokumentera hur ett ögonblick uttrycks lexikalt i olika språk. Utöver det syftar jag till att fastställa de olika uttryckens morfosyntaktiska status, analysera vad för slags kontext de förekommer i, och identifiera de olika konceptuella källorna som kan ge upphov till uttrycken i fråga. Data samlades in utifrån ett bekvämlighetsurval av 37 mestadels obesläktade språk genom att använda en korpus med bibelöversättningar, lexikon, referensgrammatiker, och etymologiska ordböcker. Ett uttryck för konceptet ögonblick hittades i 27 av 37 språk. Circa 74% av uttrycken (20 av 27) användes inom adverbfraser, då de antigen förekom med lokativa affix eller med adpositioner. Circa 41% av uttrycken (11 av 27) hade konceptuella källor som kunde associeras med TID, medan circa 30% (8 av 27) hade med SYN att göra. Denna studie bidrar till kunskapen om hur abstrakta temporala koncept uttrycks lexikalt.

Данная диссертация посвящена исследованию категории исчисляемости на примере английских существительных singularia tantum. В работе исследуется каким образом эти существительные могут переходить в разряд исчисляемых, рассматриваются особенности этого перехода, в частности семантические сдвиги существительных singularia tantum и оценивается влияние контекста на этот переход. / This thesis is dedicated to the research of the category of countability illustrated by singularia tantum nouns in the English language. The study shows how singularia tantum nouns can move to the class of countable nouns, looks into the characteristics of this transition, especially into the sematic shift of singularia tantum nouns and evaluates the influence of the context on this transition.

The present thesis deals with, and elaborates on, the concept of sense inheritance (particularly with respect to suffixation in Czech). Drawing on more general remarks on lexical meaning, polysemy, and the semantic relatedness of a derived word and its base, the theoretical part of the thesis delineates the notion of sense inheritance, originating within the framework of construction grammar. It is shown that the idea of sense inheritance has at least implicitly been present in Czech lexicology (cf. the derivational criterion for identifying senses of polysemous words) and lexicography. It is argued that the traditional Czech theory of word formation relies on the assumption of the semantic transparency or even compositionality of motivated words, which can hardly be squared with empirical evidence concerning sense inheritance, nevertheless. In the empirical part of the thesis semantic relations are analyzed that hold between derivatives within 43 word families of polysemous bases (denoting body parts), and subsequently the sense-inheritance properties of the 80 most frequent (hence established and lexicalized) derivatives with the agentive suffix -tel and polysemous base verbs are contrasted with those found in 100 hapax legomena derived from polysemous bases with the same affix. This enables not...