A Study On Yuan Dynasty Quantifiers

Chinese is rich in quantifiers, which is one of the characteristics of this language. The occurance of quantifiers, firstly in the form of oracle bone inscriptions, dates back to as early as 3000 years ago. Research on quantifiers, however, came into being much later, and the efforts made in research have been imbalanced. To look at the whole picture, studies on the quantifiers up to the Tang Dynasty was relatively ample, most of which was allround. In contrast, the studies on the quantifer which were used in the Dynasties of Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing, was scattered and scarce. Hence the difficulty in carrying on quantifier development. Consequently,the overall research on quantifiers in the above four dynasties is indispensable so as to build up the history of quantifiers. With a view to the reason mentioned above, I sleeted Yuan Dynasty quantifiers as subject, intending to give a dynastic description of Yuan Dynasty quantifiers,to the end of making all opproaching step toward the formation of the history of quantifiers, which is an ultimate objective.The thesis is composed of two parts. The first part is the description of Yuan Dynasty quantifiers. After investigating into the language corpus that is about twenty million characters in length.I processed the quantifiers by abstraction, categorization and exposition. In this thesis, quantifiers are subsumed into the following two categories:the noun-modifying quantifiers and the verb-modifying quantifiers. The former explains measure quantifiers, nature quantifiers and provisional noun-modifying quantifiers;the latter elucidate special verb-modifying classifiers and provisional verb-modifying quantifiers. During the description of every specific quantifier, the usage of each quantifier in the Yuan Dynasty was explained meticulously, meanwhile, its evolution and changed over time were also taken into account. Thus, synchrony and diachrony, static state and dynamic state were organically integrated together so much so that Yuan Dynasty quantifiers, formerly in plane forms, now gains a tendency toward stereoscopy.The second part of this thesis is theoretical research,in which some traits and laws of Yuan Dynasty quantifiers were touched upon. This episode contains the six topics below:(l)The ver'-plus phenomenon in Yuan Dynasty zaju and sanqu(a poetic drama & a verse set to music respectively) reflected northern oral Chinese of that time.(2)There are plentiful inflections in Yuan Dynasty quantifiers ,which is a important word-building method.(3)Compared with modern Chinese.Yuan Dynasty quantifiers were not only in great number.but also complicated in usage.(4)There is little difference in the degree of gehua(the extensive use of quantifier "ge" ) between Yuan Dynasty quantifiers and those in modern Chinese.since the gehua in Yuan Dynasty quantifiers was advanced to quite high degrees.(5)The structure designs of Yuan Dynasty was already complete.(6)The frequency in using quantifiers varied with different styles.