Chen Wangdao Historic Contribution Of Chinese Grammar Rhetoric

This article emphasizes the historical contributions made by the Mr. Chen Wan Dao's researches on grammar and rhetoric. Mr. Chen made use of his rich knowledge of science, intensive material dialectics, and the theories of linguistics as a basis in his researches. He adopted not only the methods used by researchers of all ages, both oriental and occidental, but also sinicised his research methods. His creative, innovative and trend-setting characteristics of grammatical and rhetoric theories, points of view and research methods have significantly influenced the future researches of grammar and rhetoric of China.His historic contributions to the study of Chinese grammar lies in his promotion of "Discussions on the Innovation of Grammar", in which he raises the topics of the functionalities. With the help of functionalities, he establishes the parts of speech and the system of sentence patterns. In his important dissertation on "The Study of Grammar", he explains in summary the theory of functionality, and its use in Chinese parts of speech. He clearly confirms the view that Chinese parts of speech must base on functionality. "The Simplified Discourse on Grammar" establishes a special grammar system. The book comprehensively explains the view that functionality is the basis for the classification of parts of speech, and that functionality is the driving force behind the phrases in language structure. His view on functionality has already been widely accepted by the linguistic scholars in the country. His concepts on the system of parts of speech, and his standard and methods of classification of parts of speech has a very strong impact on posterity. The classification methods of Mr. Chen coincides with those of the Western academic circles.His historical contributions to the study of rhetoric are mainly evidenced in the book "Themes of Rhetoric" and a few other dissertations on rhetoric. This ageless book has established the first relatively scientific entity in the history of rhetoric of China. It does not only cover the rhetoric of classical Chinese, but also that of modern Chinese. It forms the first rhetoric entity in the modern sense, and...