| The Warring States period & Qin dynasty is a crucial period in Chinese history in which the society transited from fragmentation to unification. The integration of society and language was established during annexation among states. Meanwhile, the unification of Qin has remarkable significance, marking the initial formation of the Chinese cultural community. The Warring States period & Qin dynasty is an important period of Chinese development, in which vocabulary was enriched rapidly with new words appearing in large quantity. Based on the exhaustive data statistics and analysis, the dissertation targets the new monosyllabic words and polysyllabic words appearing in this period and describes them with multi-angle, aiming at summarizing the main feature of vocabulary development in this period. Lexical study of one dynasty is part of the lexical study of the whole Chinese history. In addition to the diachronic analysis, the study applies to the synchronic analysis method to investigate the changes in the whole process of the Chinese development, hoping to get the overall grasp of the development of Chinese vocabulary context through diachronic comparison.The dissertation consists of three parts:the introduction, the main body and the conclusion.The introduction part defines the scope of the new words appearing in the Warring States & Qin dynasty, briefly makes a bibliographical review of the study related to this period, and introduces the study objectives and study methods, as well as a detailed description of the new words corpus construction is introduced in details.Chapter One analyses in detail the symbolic words field reflecting social features, through which the inextricably linked relationship is presented between new words and social development in this period. The symbolic words field reflecting social features is subdivided into five small semantic fields, which are related to politics, military, agriculture, social culture and ideology & science. Sememe analysis is used to analyze the words in each field. Based on the relations between new words, six semantic sub-fields are determined, which are apposition semantic field, sequential semantic field, synonymy semantic field, antonymy semantic field, hyponymy semantic field and semantic field of both whole & parts relationship and non-gradation relationship. There are three distinct characteristics of the symbolic words field in this period:sociability, diversity and time characteristics.Chapter Two focuses on the development of Chinese ancient basic vocabulary system in this period.This chapter introduces briefly the present basic vocabulary study, discusses the judgment criteria of basic vocabulary and describes in detail the process of accumulation and substitution in Chinese basic vocabulary, exploring the rule of basic vocabulary development from the comparison between the ancient time and modern time. The study illustrates the fact that the ancient basic vocabulary system had been formed basically before the Warring States period. As far as the vocabulary system is concerned, the semantic development is the main reason resulting in the substitution of basic words, urging part of new words appearing in the Warring States period & Qin dynasty enter the ancient basic vocabulary system. In addition, the more closely related to the social life, the more likely a new word enters the ancient basic vocabulary system, and some basic words are dialect originally, which indicates that the social development is another important reason for the evolution of the ancient basic vocabulary system.Chapter Three draws an outline of the new monosyllabic words in this period, summarizes the patterns of monosyllabic word formation. In terms of semantics, some new monosyllabic words express new things and concept appearing in this period, while others express things and concept existing before the Warring States period. In terms of philology, most new monosyllabic words are pictophonetic characters, employing new character patterns. Native word creation and derivation are the main way of monosyllabic word generation. Most of the native words are generated with arbitrary combination between pronunciation and meaning, while those created by derivation show some combination rules between pronunciation and meaning.Chapter Four focuses on polysyllabic words. This chapter discusses the judgment criteria of polysyllabic words, followed by a thorough analysis of polysyllabic words from the three aspects:syllable, grammar and lexical structure, and summarizes the patterns of polysyllabic word formation. In terms of syllable, new disyllabic words are the most representative of polysyllabic words with absolute advantage in quantity. In terms of grammar, disyllabic nouns and verbs, adjectives account for the majority, and the number of nouns is the largest. In terms of lexical structure, the combined structure words and primary inclined structure words account for the majority. The amount of primary inclined structure words is the highest, which illustrates that the primary inclined structure rather than the combined structure is the dominating pattern of word formation. Native word creation and composition are the main way of polysyllabic word generation. Only a small number of polysyllabic words are native ones. The majority of polysyllabic words are generated by morpheme collocation. There are four types of composition: rhetoric, syntax, repetition and affixation, among which rhetoric and syntax are more fruitful.Chapter Five focuses on morphemes of the new compound words. Three aspects are discussed in this part:the composing ability of morpheme, the development of the morpheme meaning and the semantic relationship between morphemes and compound words. Compared with before, Morphemes" ability to form words in this period is improved significantly. Different morphemes differ in composing ability. Some can form hundreds of new words. Generally speaking, the old morphemes show greater ability in comparison with the new morphemes. Some morphemes with social features create large amount of vocabulary, which indicates that the composing ability of morpheme is closely related with social development. Morphemes are the basis of the formation of words. In the Warring States period & Qin dynasty, some morphemes' meaning merge directly to form, while others merge indirectly, which lead to an obscure relationship between the meaning of morpheme and word.The conclusion part summarizes the causes leading to the new words formation. The new words formation is a comprehensive result of inner lingual development as well as social causes. The pattern of new vocabulary development in the Warring States period & Qin dynasty coincides with the general modes of Chinese vocabulary development.The new words appearing in the Warring States period & Qin dynasty is studied systematically in the dissertation, which could be considered an initial achievement in the study of Chinese vocabulary history. Previous studies on the vocabulary of the Warring States period & Qin dynasty mostly targeted the vocabulary in books in this period, mixing the words with no difference. Those studies failed to embody the value of lexical study of special book vocabulary on the lexical study of one dynasty. Although there are a very few studies on the vocabulary of the Warring States period & Qin dynasty, they laid focus on the symbolic words fields reflecting social features, lacking comprehensive study on the new vocabulary. This study applies modern lexical theories to the study, and combines theoretical study into practice for the first time. By making some theoretical discussion, such as the judgment criteria of basic vocabulary and polysyllabic words, the study tries to offer some valuable materials for the construction of Chinese vocabulary general history.The following are the innovation of this dissertation.First, corpus construction is relatively scientific, which provides a solid study foundation. Before the establishment of the corpus, the era of corpus literature was carefully examined to guarantee the accuracy. The new words corpus construction is on the basis of Great Chinese Dictionary in addition to a variety of reference books and other ancient Chinese corpus, in order to give a comprehensive and rigorous examination word by word, trying all the potential to ensure the accuracy of data.Second, based on the statistics, study on the new vocabulary is exhaustive. All the words in the corpus are analyzed, especially for the polysyllabic words. From syllable, grammar to lexical structure, each conclusion is drawn with evidence supports from statistics.Third, the scope of the study extends from Xi Zhou dynasty & the Spring and Autumn period to modern time. For example, the study on basic vocabulary and the composing ability of morpheme are under the diachronic analysis. The synchronic and diachronic analysis methods are applied to the study, giving a more extensive significance to the study and valuable material to the study of Chinese vocabulary history.Fourth, the study process lays more focus on the modern linguistic theories. For instance, sememe analysis method is applied to analyze the sememes in the semantic field, examines the semantic structure of words from the micro level. Semantic structure dichotomy is used to analyze etymeme in cognate words, revealing the development of cognate words. The application of modern linguistic theories makes the study more reasonable.Finally, the study does research on morphemes of the new compound words comprehensively. In order to fully reveal the composing ability of morpheme, two different aspects are discussed in depth:different meanings of a polysemy morpheme and one meaning of a morpheme. Meanwhile, the relationship between the morpheme meaning and the word meaning as well as the pattern of morphemes' meaning merging into words are summarized thoroughly. |
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