| Xu Heng was a famous thinker,politician and educator in the Yuan Dynasty.He made outstanding contributions in many fields such as literature,politics,education,medicine,astronomical calendar and so on.With so many achievements,he has been in the later ages honored as "the only great Confucian in the Yuan Dynasty" and "only great Confucian after Zhu Xi".With a strong spirit of motivation,Xu Heng initiated a writing way of straightly explicating the vernacular for Chinese classics.This way of writing integrates the vernacular with classic literatures so as to promote the dissemination and popularization of Confucianist classics,and conform to the demands of the times by transforming the language form from classic into vernacular.Xu Heng’s works had been successively collected and published,respectively entitled ‘Collected Works of Lu Zhai’,‘Collected Works of Xu Wenzheng’ etc..Nowadays,these works merge into ‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’ which include chapters of Quotation and Straight Explication as very rare and valuable documents for the research of Chinese evolution from classic to vernacular.In the past 50 years,scholars from all over the world have been focusing on the studies of Xu Heng and his works,which were followed all the time by many achievements,books and conferences.Based on the study of predecessors,this thesis,with the copy in Siku Quanshu as master copy and the Wanli copy as reference,sorts out the chapters of Quotation and Straight Explication in ‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’,and isolates and arranges every term.With the above documents and terms as research foundation and angle,this thesis tries to display the actual oral Chinese in the early Yuan Dynasty by exploring the outlook,features,sources,structure and application of Chinese vocabulary in early Yuan Dynasty with a new perspective and approach,in order to make an adequate description of the term system of vernacular in that period.Both synchronic characteristics and diachronic changes are attached importance to in the research work.In details,this thesis consists of nine parts.The introduction sorts out and summarizes the recent years’ research results in China and abroad about Xu Heng and ‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’ by means of exploring the overall status of relative research in terms of both the research forms and categories,giving weight to the analysis and discussion on ‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’ from the linguistic perspective.Meanwhile,the research reason,method and innovation of this thesis are presented.The first chapter makes an overall introduction to Xu Heng and his legacy,‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’.The first section is a summary of Xu Heng’s family history,life,birthplace,tombs,friendship and contribution,which shows Xu Heng’s real and lively appearance so as to help us to no longer feel unfamiliar with this ancient distinguished person of Henan province.The second section makes a survey about the editions and spread of Xu Heng’s writings on the basis of the respective discussion on three categories of the separated editions,the collected editions,and the punctuated editions nowadays.In this way,the development vein has been found and constructed for those collected editions of Yuan,Ming and Qing,grouped into three clusters so as to show directly the intricate relationship between them.The second chapter profiles the vocabulary in ‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’,mainly analyzing its composition,source,appearance,features and causes.The composition of this vocabulary is studied from noun,verb,adjectives,etc.The vocabulary of‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’ originates from both inheritance and new coinage.As far as inheritance is concerned,Zhu Xi’s ‘Notes for Chapters and Sentences of Four Books’ had an obvious influence on Xu Heng.The vocabulary of ‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’ takes on an outlook of multi-source over times and diversification in development.displaying four distinct features of vernacular characteristic,mixing classic and vernacular,reflecting changes over time,and displaying words’ traits,which result from microscopic and macroscopic factors.The third chapter is about the phenomenon of synonym and antonym in the vocabulary of ‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’.For the analysis of synonyms,the criteria and methods to identify them are ascertained firstly.Then the paper individually analyzes the frequency and composition of synonyms of ‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’ counted in two main sources,Siku Quanshu edition and other editions.The antonyms are discussed in noun,verb,and adjectives.The fourth chapter presentes some case studies of the words in‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’.The first section makes a study on the origin of the word‘Jian Shi’and its evolution in language use,and the reasons for its fading out of the modern Chinese.The second section presents the basic features of the words meaning deception‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’in the way of teasing out the semantic source and functional evolution of the oral word‘Hong’(哄)with the meaning of deception.The third section investigates in details the syntactic function of the quantifier‘Jian’(件),which meant piece,in‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’,and the development of the‘One Jianjian’(一件件)format flourishing in the Song and Yuan Dynasties.In the fifth chapter,a comprehensively textual research is made on the citations in ‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’ as an innovative work.Because of Xu Heng’frequent quotation of other people’s words in his writing,later generations,after a long historical period,often confused such words with his own words so as to make them indistinguishable.Mistakenly treating these materials from different literatures as an intrinsic part,and mixing diachronic and heterogeneous linguistic materials,the previous researchers failed to pay enough attention to the citations in the ‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’,which resulted in damage to the authenticity of literatures in ‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’.In this thesis,the modern searching tools are applied to comprehensively review and quantify the Quotation and Straight Explication of‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’.Over one hundreds of quoted paragraphs and sentences with nearly 10,000 Chinese characters are detected,and three contemporary punctuated editions are compared.Besides,the differences,between Xu Heng’s citations and the original,are also examined and interpreted.The sixth chapter is about the examination and interpretation of differences between several editions of Xu Heng’s poems.Poems are an important part of ‘Collected Works of Xu Heng’,and poetic language research is an important aspect of literature language research.Previously,few researchers had noticed the value and significance of Xu Heng’s poetic language.This thesis examines and interprets the differences between poems from different editions,especially different characters and words,which helps to clarify the real features of Xu Heng’s poems.The seventh chapter discusses the straightforward style of Xu Heng’s poetic language,with the recognition that his language is characterized by the common and unadorned words,the civilian narrative,and the use of tautology and reduplication.And the causes of these characteristics are analyzed from the perspectives of language,thought,and society.The last chapter,Xu Heng’s ‘Daxue’s Straight Explication’ is contrasted with Zhang Juzheng’s ‘Sishu’s Straight Explication’(Daxue Section)and Zhu Xi’s Commentaries on the Four Books(Daxue Section),they are explication of the ‘Daxue’.In the explications of the some items,many sentences and words of these three books were identical or similar.Through contrasting the synonyms the variant texts resulting from the similar sentences,the paper investigates the differences of vocabulary development three times,and reproduce the historical development course of Chinese during the Song,Yuan and Ming Dynasties. |
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