Research Into The Language Network And Social Network Of Zuozhuan

The research into Zuozhuan, an important classical document in the pre-Qin period, is conducted from the perspective of network science in the present dissertation. Classical document has played two important roles:language heritage and historical records. The study on Zuozhuan’s language network starts out from the role of language heritage, and adopts Zuozhuan as language data, while the study on Zuozhuan’s social network starts out from the role of historical records, and adopts Zuozhuan as historial document. These two parts of study are interrelated and combined together from the same research perspectives, by the same research methods, and under the same conceptual and theoretical framework-network science.The general ideas of the present study are as follows:the study of language network, based on the reflections of all the literature available, takes both Zuozhuan in pre-Qin Chinese version and its modern Chinese version as its research objects, constructs the network of their word co-occurrences, and carries out a parallel comparison so as to analyze and describe the overall Chinese lexical systems, their differences and similarities. The study of social network, based on the theoretical discussions of historical-social network analysis, and constructs the network of the character relationships in Spring and Autumn periods so as to probe into their social histories reflected in Zuozhuan and its key characters.The overall research objectives of this dissertation are as follows:This research aims to achieve some fruitful results different from the traditional research into Zuozhuan and its document information processing.There are three major findings of the present research:First of all, as far as "the small world", i.e. the network of word co-occurrences, is concerned, the difference between Zuozhuan and its modern Chinese version is similar to the distinction between Isolating language and Polysynthetic language. Secondly, different from other research results of language network available, this research has found that the degree distribution in the network of word co-occurrences submits to the log-normal distribution rather than the power law distribution. Finally, Confucius hasn’t appeared frequently in Zuozhuan, but has very special metric value of network characteristics and network postions, which matches up with his historical experiences at that time.There are mainly three innovations in the present research. First, innovation in research method. In the whole process of the research, whether it is Zuozhuan’s character research or its lexical research, we don’t analyze its individual sentences or words, but approach Zuozhuan from the perspective of network secience with structure-relation vision. Second, innovation in research applications. As a new research paradigm, the network science of Zuozhuan in the present study can be applied extensively to the history, philology and linguistics. Third, innovation in research object. The present research adopts Zuozhuan and its modern Chinese version as its objects, and carries out their parallel data comparison to avoid the variations in contents and lexicons dut to the change of the world. This can also highlight its linguistic commonness and speciality.