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Literally, the character “尾” (tail) is an important part of animals. In Chinese, however, the character has been projected semantically to the human body, space, or time. Many studies on the Taiwanese Southern Min dialect(TSM) have investigated the character “頭”, while related research on the character “尾” is rarely found. This study thus analyzed, categorized, and investigated the connotations of the character “尾” based on a corpus. Then, this study compared the present design of TSM teaching materials for elementary schools with the corpus analysis of this study to make recommendations for teaching sequencing. In addition to its literal meaning, research findings show that the character “尾” can connote the “end” of space and time by means of metaphorization and metonymification, either vertically or horizontally. For example, the character “尾” connotates “the rear or the back” when expressing the relative position of a distance, or the end of time or an event. Morphologically, the corpus shows that the character “尾” is often used in compounding, mostly in attributive compounds 39%, subordinate compounds 25%, coordinate compounds 7%, and the diminutive suffix 17%. Others include the single morph and set phrase 7% and the quantifier 5%. Semantically, the character “尾” connotes the finish point or the end of space and time by means of metaphorization and metonymification. This study analyzed and discussed the frequency of use of the character “尾” in the corpus and the present design of teaching materials for the character in terms of semantics and morphology, hoping to provide a reference for the effective and explicit teaching sequencing of the character for teachers through the interrelations between semantics and morphology, with the character “尾” as the stem.
Keywords: character “尾”, metaphorization, corpus, morphology, teaching sequencing
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