A Study On Common Words In Pre-Qin

Based on the research fruit made by our predecessors on common words, anddrawing on the successful experience of Modern Chinese word frequency count,this essay first makes a full sort out of the 231 terms of inscriptions and the 9authentic and reliable literature of the pre-Qin days, thus achieving a generalvocabulary which covers four periods and five sections. The four periods are theearly Western Zhou Dynasty to the middle of Western Zhou dynasty, the middleof Western Zhou Dynasty to the late Spring and Autumn Period, the late Spring andAutumn Period to the middle of Warring States, and the middle of Warring Statesto Qin Dynasty. The five part or materials are as follows: (1) 231 terms ofinscriptions made from early Western Zhou dynasty to the middle of Western Zhoudynasty; (2) the part of Shijing, Zhouyi(classic), Shangshu(only part of modernscripts); (3) another part of Shijing, The Spring and Autumn Annals; (4) TheAnalects of Confucians, Shangjunshu, Zuozhuan ; (5) Mencius, Zhuangzi,Lvshichunqiu. In conformity with the document types, the materials of the firstperiod are divided into two parts: excavated documents and documents handeddown from ancient times. These two parts and the later three make up five. And thegeneral vocabulary consists of five sections, namely, serial number order, entryword frequency, frequency of occurrence and coverage rate. Focusing on thecoverage rate in the light of word-using frequency, we judge the common words ofdifferent periods, analyse their characteristics and their development during thewhole pre-Qin days.Besides the introduction and concluding remarks, the chief part of the presentessay is made up of six chapters. The first chapter stresses the importance of theword-cutting from text, the difference between words and phrases and lexeme-judging, of which strictly distinguishing words and phrases is the basis ofword-cutting. So this essay gives a detailed analysis of the different standards of words judging and their applying range, dealing with some hard-handled cases.This essay also introduces the two concepts of lexeme and variant of lexeme,holding what is cut from the text is the variant of lexeme not the lexeme so thatword frequency counting should be done by the lexeme as a unit. The variants oflexeme include writing variant, pronunciation variant, grammatical function andmeaning variant. When judging the lexeme, we should know that some wordswhich are different in written form are the variants of the same lexeme. No matterhow many types of writing a word has, it is to be dealt with as one word, while thewords with the same written form must be handled differently when we do wordsfrequency-counting. The second and the fifth chapters deal with the four periods ofthe language material situation, the outline situation and how to judge commonwords and their characteristics in different periods. The sixth chapter analyses theamount of the characters of the documents, the amount of words, the total capacityof the expressions and the relationship between common words, making an analysisof words development both in form and meaning in the eye of history. This veryessay points out that common words are the core of language words, reflectingthe steady of common words in the same part of each period. Additionally,common words are developed constantly, both in the amount and in the change ofsome common words in different periods. The change in meaning is displayedmainly by the constant increase of new meanings.