Investigation On The Character-to-Word Relationship Based On Warring States Bamboo Slips (Volume1-8) Preserved By Tsinghua University

Warring States Bamboo Slips Preserved By Tsinghua University(“Tsinghua Slips” for short)had drawn a hot spotlight from the academic domain since they were unveiled in 2008.It can be regarded as the most influential “discovery” nowadays.These slips retained the origi nal appearance of ancient Chinese characters in the State of Chu during Warring States(475B C – 221BC)and are of great academic value.This paper aims at the study of character-to-word relationship embedded in the eight volumes of Tsinghua Slips(vol.1-8).It categorizes the correlated types from characters to words,examines the conventions of charactering and wording,and investigates the causes of evolution in order to reveal visually the perplexing connections of Chinese characters and words as well as the unique habits of regional charactering and wording in the State of Chu.The first chapter of this paper comes with the part of “Introduction”,which gives the background and purpose of the proposed thesis.It describes the theoretical construction of character-to-word relations and the processing issues with respect to partitioning and domain sectioning.The study focuses on the application of character-to-word relations of Tsinghua Slips.The first chapter encloses with the academic meaning and approaches of this research.Chapter 2,3 and 4 bear the substantial analysis of one character etymology for one word,one character etymology for multiple words,and one word with multiple forms of character symbols.The impetus of evolution pulls a thorough scrutiny.Chapter 2 involves two categories: characters used as their connotation and characters loaned for other characters.Chapter 3 sifts the stuff regarding the phenomenon of one character used for recording multiple words.According to evolutionary processes,the homologous differentiation of identical characters and the loan characters from similar phonetic characters have formed two basic classes.Chapter 4 discusses the five taxonomies of one word with multiple forms of character symbols.They are labeled with variant glyphs of the same character,the same character of variant stroke stems,loan characters from similar characters,misused characters,and contextual aspects.The overlapped influence of all factors above results in the fascinating aspects of character-to-word relationship illustrated in the Tsinghua Slips.Chapter 5 comes with the conclusion,which gives a brief summary of the etymological taxonomy of diversified word relationships based on sampling cases shown in the Tsinghua Slips.In the mainframe of character-to-word correlation,this paper focuses on two hundred samples of characters in Tsinghua slips,which are predominant and well-defined,to give a full description of the form and usage of these characters under a methodology of “characters as entries and words derivatives”.As to the form,a diachronic analysis of ancient character evolution is done to survey the value and function of Tsinghua slips in the history.As to the usage,a comprehensive study of lexical notes and other examples explored from traditional masterpieces is accomplished to the character usage and word meaning of Tsinghua slips upon the editor’s explanation and other learners’ comments.