Grammar Study On Tao Hongjing’s Taoist Scriptures

At the macroscopic perspective of discipline background, the research scope of Chinese language history is expanding constantly in the process from its foundation to further development, which causes its collision with other subjects. Especially since90s,20th century, with the elaborate subject division and the increasing analytical methods, Taoist scriptures has become a rich deposit contains rich corpus resources after a relatively dense study on the language of Confucian and Buddhist classics, and then the major subject has transferred from religious scholars to linguistic scholars. So the linguistic study on Taoist scriptures has become a new academic growth point of the Chinese linguistic history.Just under such a background, this article deals with several grammar topics as quantifiers, predicative sentences, interrogative sentences, imperative sentences, and procedural discourse on Tao Hongjing’s three Taoist scriptures "Zhengao""Zhou shimingtongji" and "Dengzhenyinjue". It tries to introduce new concepts and perspectives in the grammar study on specialized works, focusing on the definition of corpus statistics and laying equal stress on both theory and facts, so the results will inspire the dynastic history of Chinese study, specialized books’language research and the research of modern Chinese.It is composed of6chapters as follows:Chapter1:Introduction. First it arranges the existent study of Taoist scriptures language since1980s, to grasp the development trend of the cross-discipline "Taoist Scriptures Linguistic". Second, it illustrates the research situation and the edition of the three books. At last, the significance, research methods and principles of corpus use are elaborated.Chapter2:Quantifiers. First, the nowaday studies on quantifier of Southern and Northern Dynasties is summarised, and then the quantifiers are classified combined with index data to check out the grammaticalization degree of noun-quantifiers and verb-quantifiers, and investigates the grammaticalized course of noun-quantifier "ju". The conclusion indicates that the grammaticalization of noun-quantifiers is slightly higher than the average level of the contemporaneous literatures. Limited by function of "procedural discourse", the grammaticalization in verb-quantifiers of Tao’s books represent the highest level of verb-quantifiers’ development in his time, higher than other contemporaneous literatures in use frequency and grammaticalization. The rest of the chapter analyses the culture elements implied in verb-quantifiers of the books.Chapter3:Predicative sentences. The distribution of five sentence form is depicted, the cognitive and logistic character of "wei" predicative sentence is discussed.The real status of "wei" is categorization marker in Chinese, and the mode of "wei" predicative sentence is brought up:Analytical form of concept+wei+integrated form of concept, which is tested and confirmed by the statistics from pre-Qin to Southern and Northern Dynasties corpus. In addition, to evaluate the mature degree of the copula "shi", the passage revises the criterion raised by Wang Li: if and only if three types adverbs are in front of the copula "shi", in which the copula "shi" is highly sophisticated. With the standard, the copula "shi" in the books is nearly mature, showing certain degree of historical limitations.Chapter4:Interrogative sentences. This chapter contains two parts. The first part classifies and calculates interrogative sentences of Tao’books, whose distribution is unbalanced because of the different contents of the books. The second part pays more attention to the six formal markers of interrogative sentence, investigating their synchronic appearance and diachronic evolution and finding out that their grammaticalization degree, subjectivisation grade, and pragmatic-marker function present systematic distinctions.Chapter5:Imperative sentences. The chapter points out the theoretical dilemma in current study on imperative sentences, which is that the concept of imperative sentences is ambiguously defined because it doesn’t have a clear connotation and denotation, then puts forward an assumption of classification according to style. It is separately summed up conversation and procedural discourse in ratio of positive and negative, syntactic structure and modality of all imperative sentences in the books, to show the significant distinctive characteristics in two styles of imperative sentences, which reflects the influence of syntax by style.Chapter6:Procedural discourse. This chapter is an extension of Chapter5. An integrated procedural discourse includes three parts:manipulated condition(MC), manipulated process(MP), and manipulated effect(MB).126procedural discourses in the books were investigated, imperative sentences groups as the researching object, six semantic relations are analysed:coordinate relation, selective relation, opposite relation, complementary relation, ordinal relation and progressive relation. It also has an attached study on the topic marker "fan" located at the beginning of the discourse. The study indicates the topic marker "fan" inclines to be co-occurrent with procedural discourse. What’s more, it investigates anaphora and thematic progression and sums up five thematic progression patterns:same anaphora, incomplete same anaphora, zero anaphora, general anaphora and pronoun anaphora and their characteristics. At last, several patterns of thematic progression are listed.The last chapter:Conclusion. Several grammar issues mainly discusses in the article were summarized, generalizing the basic outlook and historical status of the books, pointing out the questions which are not discussed and incredulous, to hope for a further study and prospecting the future possible research.