A Linguistic Study On Literatures Of Southern Min Dialect In Ming And Qing Dynasties

Southern Min dialect has a long history. The earliest known literatures in Southern Min dialect date back to Ming dynasty, mainly including dialectal dictionaries and literature of ancient traditional operas. As time went to Qing dynasty, some rhyming dictionaries and texts of ballads appeared. All the literatures above reflect the characteristics of pronunciations, grammar patterns and vocabulary words of Southern Min dialect. They are important materials for the establishment of the history of Southern Min dialect. The corpus for this research comprised of two categories: dialect dictionaries and literatures of ancient traditional operas.(1) Dialect Dictionaries. Zheng ying xiang tan(正音乡谈)and Guan hua hui jie(官话汇解) are two representative works of dialect dictionaries. (2) Literatures of Ancient Traditional Operas. Lijing ji(荔镜记), Jin hua nu(金花女) and Yu yan li jing(�'�顔丽锦) were written in Southern Min dialect, in which lots of linguistic phenomena merit critical attention. This research intends to analyze the dialect characters and vocabulary of Southern Min dialect in Ming and Qing Dynasties, and then explore the historical development of Southern Min dialect.The research contents are as follows:(1) To make a brief overview of vernacular literature of southern Fujian in Ming and Qing Dynasties, and summarize the achievements by former scholars and pointed out the breakthrough of the present thesis.(2) To demonstrate the attribution of dialects in Zheng ying xiang tan(正音乡谈)and Guan hua hui jie(官话汇解) from the dual perspectives of philology and linguistics, and investigate the biographical information on the author of Guan hua hui jie(官话汇解) To investigate the important value of vernacular literature of southern Fujian in Ming and Qing Dynasties for the Chinese language study, dictionary compilation, the research of the dialectal history and the normalization of written Southern Min dialec. (4) To study on the vocabulary and characters of vernacular literature of southern Fujian in Ming and Qing Dynasties by using several research methods. In the part of vocabulary study, this paper summarized an overview of vocabulary of vernacular literature and explained six classes of vocabulary. In the part of characters study, this paper classified dialect characters into four types, and explained their meanings and methods of character-formation. Meanwhile, it took an etymological note of four common words of Southern Min dialect in Ming and Qing Dynasties from perspective of semantic analysis.