Study On The Classifiers In Records Of Huayang State

Compared with the Indo-European language, Chinese is rich in classifiers, which is one of the most obvious characteristics of this language. The occurrence of classifiers, early in the form of oracle bone inscriptions, dates back to as early as Shang-Zhou Dynasty. Research on classifiers, however, came into being much later. As an important chorography of the mid-ancient times, Records of Huayang State is an important source text for the research on the history of Chinese, because it displays the real appearance of that time. For a long time, the research on the important language phenomenon in Records of Huayang State, such as the classifiers is still very fragmentary. So I make a comprehensive investigation into the classifiers in Records of Huayang State, and try to recognize the characteristics of Chinese classifier's outline in Wei- Jin Dynasty and some regularities of the development of classifiers.The thesis is about 45,000 characters, consists of five chapters. Chapter one includes the research value of the study, the materials and the methods used in this thesis, and a brief introduction of classifiers. Chapter two describes the classifiers in Records of Huayang State according to their classifications. Firstly, I conduct an exhaustive information retrieval and statistics, and then categorize the classifiers in this book on that basis. Secondly, I study the classifiers in this book one by one basing on the investigation. Chapter three is about the analysis of the classifiers' usage in Records of Huayang State. It discusses the usage of the classifiers, the regularities of the quantifiers in this book combined with the noun, and the syntactic function of the quantifiers in this book. I sum up the characters of the classifiers in this book on the analysis. Chapter four compares the classifiers in Records of Huayang State diachronicly with other classifiers in other representative books which belong to Pre-Qin and the Han Dynasty as well as Wei- Jin Dynasty, in order that we can recognize the development of the classifiers in Records of Huayang State clearly. In chapter five, I sum up the characters of the classifiers in this book as well as the development of them on the basis of previous comprehensive and systemic analysis. The research results of this thesis provide data for further study in the future.