A Study On Prepositions In JING DE CHUAN DENG LU

This paper aims to give a clear and full description of prepositions in JING DE CHUAN DENG LU that, as one of the Analects of Chan, reflects the spoken language of early Song Dynasty. Concise comparisons with BIAN WEN,SHI SHUO XIN YU and Excerpt of Analects of ZHU XI reveal the dialectal differences and historical developments regarding of the numbers of prepositions, the usage of prepositons and the syntactic positions of preposition phrases.Excluding the narrative parts in JING DE CHUAN DENG LU which shows no linguistic features of any specific time, the paper describes about 74 prepositions in the dialogues as well as preaching monologues and Chan poems by some famous masters.In JING DE CHUAN DENG LU, there are three post-verb prepositions"于actor,于comparison,乎", which indicates that old language forms tend to stick to old rules. Preposition phrases of resultative meaning usually lie after the main verbs with few exceptions while preposition phrases of non-resultative meaning may lie after verbs when the main verbs are monosyllable single words.The comparison displays some dialectal differences between JING DE CHUAN DENG LU and BIAN WEN. Prepositions in JING DE CHUAN DENG LU usually take on more functional loads and are of smaller post-verb proportion than that of BIAN WEN because the poetry style of BIAN WEN limits its presentation of preposition usage in real language practice.Compared with SHI SHUO XIN YU, prepotions in JING DE CHUAN DENG LU are of a bigger number. And prepositions"从,在,向,著"are of various usages with a tendency of temporary overgeneralization. The post-verb proportion shows a stable decreasing inclination.From the comparison between JING DE CHUAN DENG LU and Excerpt of Analects of ZHU XI, it can be seen that prepositions in Excerpt of Analects of ZHU XI are closer to prepositions in modern Chinese vernacular despite that there are dialectal differences. Accordingly preposition situation in JING DE CHUAN DENG LU is in the forming stage of modern Chinese.