The Study On Verbs Of Twelve Towers

The lexical study of a book is a basic work of lexical study of modern Chinese. It can reveal the lexical aspects of an era or lexical differences between an era and another era. The modern Chinese of the latter period of Qing Dynasty occupies an important place, because it is at a transitional period from modern Chinese of Song, Yuan and Ming Dynasty to contemporary Chinese. The lexis of this period has given birth to the unique aspects of the lexis of its day.Twelve Towers, a collection of imitation works of Huaben written by Li Yu in early Qing Dynasty, is a representative work reflecting special traits of Chinese lexis of this period. This thesis will focus on the description and analysis of verbs in Twelve Towers. It focus on the structural features of poly-syllables, study of items of polysemous verbs, verb reduplication, word forms and comparative study with verbs of contemporary Chinese. At the same time, the present thesis refers to theories relevant to lexics, semantics and to approaches adopted by Chinese traditional lexics, trying to make an extensive and thorough research of Twelve Towers to reveal the characteristics of verbs in this book.This thesis combines synchronic with diachronic descriptions, and it combines common characters with individual characters. It is a study of verbs in Twelve Towers with the objective of finding out the variation and obscure tendency towards contemporary Chinese. In the mean time, this thesis explores the traits of verbs used in early Qing Dynasty and tries to find out role the subject matter and of the content plays in determining the traits of the verbs.This thesis comprises five chapters.The preface mainly discusses the problem of different versions of Twelve Towers, judgment on words, study methods, research status and verb overview of Twelve Towers and so on.The demarcations between words and morphemes and between compound words and phrases are difficult problems. So far, most studies of Twelve Towers have been done from the literary point of view, but little has been done from the linguistic point of view. With descriptive and statistical methods, an exhaustive investigation is made in the verbs in Twelve Towers according to the number of syllables and morphemes. As a result, different categories of verbs can be found, such as monosyllables, bi-syllables and tri-syllables, simple-morpheme verbs, compound verbs and derivative verbs. Five types of compound words can be found:coordinate, verb-object, modifier-head, verb-supplement and subject-predicate. Derivatives have prefix+root and root+suffix forms.The first chapter systematically studies the characteristics of the formations of coordinate, verb-object, modifier-head, verb-supplement and subject-predicate on the basis of three aspects:part of speech, semantic, relationship of morpheme meanings. From the perspective of the number of syllables, bi-syllables in Twelve Towers give an evident expression of domination. In terms of the composition of words, bi-syllables in Twelve Towers are primarily compounds, and derivatives are only a very small part. This feature is consistent with the verb composition in contemporary Chinese.The second chapter mainly investigate the items of polysemous verbs in Twelve Towers. In terms of the number of items, univocal verbs are the main ones, while polysemous verbs occupy a small proportion in monosyllables and bi-syllables. The number of polysemous verbs reveals the trend of apparent reduction with items continuously increasing. In terms of use, a large number of words are very close in meaning to contemporary Chinese.The third chapter studies verb reduplication in Twelve Towers. Verb reduplication is the configuration overlapping in the internal of words. There are three basic forms of verb reduplication:AA, ABAB and AABB, with variant forms. Verb reduplication usually adds a variety of grammatical or pragmatic meanings. It can be seen that verb reduplication indicates short time, little quantity in action, combination of quantity in time and action, trial, stretching and repetition and euphemism modality. Verb reduplications are mainly used as predicate.The fourth chapter discusses the characteristics of word form of verbs revealed by the variant forms and words of same morpheme and different order. The variant form simply refers to the word form, while words of same morpheme and different order refer to the forms and meanings at the same time, showing the complex relationship between them.The fifth chapter carries out a comparative study of verbs between Twelve Towers with those in contemporary Chinese. The common feature of the evolution of monosyllabic, bi-syllabic and tri-syllabic verbs in Twelve Towers is that the verbs that have changed little so far are in the majority in their small lexical systems. The differences are mainly shown in two respects:one is that difference verbs and disappearance verbs take up different proportions in their systems. Compared with contemporary Chinese, monosyllabic and bi-syllabic verbs are difference verbs, while tri-syllabic verbs are disappearance verbs. The other is the differences of variation types and mainstream in difference verbs. Monosyllabic verbs have the transformation problem from morpheme to word, and bi-syllabic and tri-syllabic verbs don't. But bi-syllabic verbs have the problem of word form variation, while monosyllabic and bi-syllabic verbs have no such change. Through the description and analysis of verbs in Twelve Towers, it can be inferred that the language in it is already close to contemporary Chinese.