A Special Study On The Vocabulary Of Dunhuang Songs

Dunhuang songs are important corpus in the Tang and Five Dynasties because they are extremely colloquial and reliable.Therefore,the conclusions of language research derived from this corpus are more reliable.However,as a kind of handwritten literature,there are a lot of errors and difficult contents.Although it has been arranged by Ren Zhongmin,Xiang Chu and others,there are contents which are worth being discussed.On the basis of checking the relevant Dunhuang original volumes and refering to the research results of other scholars,this paper re-records these Dunhuang songs,and finally sorts out a more reliable corpus.On the basis of reliable corpus,this paper examines several types of lexical phenomena in Dunhuang songs,including notional words and function words.The notional words include new words and new meanings,affixes and difficult words.The function words include three types of words: adverbs,prepositions,and conjunctions.In terms of research methods,this paper uses both synchronic and diachronic studies,using both general and case studies.First,comprehensively study the vocabulary in the songs,and then compared the similarities and differences between the words in Dunhuang songs and other literatures in a synchronic and diachronic manner.Then,from each vocabulary of the Dunhuang songs,select the special words which have less research results for case studies.Judging from the Poetry of Yun Yao Ji(?????)which has been edited into a book in these Dunhuang songs,the proportion of new words and new meanings are higher,and the new words are polysyllabic words.On the one hand,it shows that the corpus is strong in spoken language,and it can record new words in time;on the other hand,it shows that the vocabulary of the Tang and Five Dynasties has a high proportion of polyphony.There are some affixes in these songs,but there are also some words which are similar to affixes.The latter is more than the number of affixes.Combined with the use cases,the affixes"ke"(?)and"si"(?)recognized by the predecessors are actually these words which are similar to affixes.The suffixes"tou"(?)and"zi"(?)in these Dunhuang songs have their own partial features in synchronicity and diachronicity.Some words consisting of the affixes"zi"(?)and"tou"(?)are only seen or first seen in the Dunhuang songs,and each stage of the semantic ambiguity of the suffix"tou"(?)has use cases in the songs.When interpreting words in the songs,we should respect the original text and not arbitrarily change it.Moreover,we should interprete the difficult words with the grammar knowledge and the vocabulary knowledge.In general,the adverbs,prepositions,and conjunctions in the songs are basically consistent with their usage in modern Chinese.In terms of syllables,prepositions are mostly monosyllabic words,while adverbs and conjunctions are mostly polysyllabic words,and most of them are synonymous compound words.After the case studies of the special words,we can find that most of the special meanings of these words can be developed through the extension of lexical meaning and grammaticalization.The conclusion that the predecessors attributed the source of related meanings to the phenomenon of tongjia should be corrected.Combining the results of the case studies with the overall situation of these words in the song can further determine that the internal cause is the most fundamental reason for the development of the word meaning.Cognitive factors,syntactic and semantic factors are important mechanisms for the ambiguity of word meaning,and are basically applicable to the grammaticalization of each word.In addition,the semantic evolution from one category to another is often reflected in multiple words,which reflects the commonality of language evolution.