A Study On The Prepositions In "Er Cheng Yi Shu"

The preposition belongs to the domain of function words. Though the number is limited, it is an important part of speech which has close relations with the verbs and conjunctions. The study on prepositions has positive significance to the deepening of cognition of grammaticalization and the grammatical development of the Chinese language. Therefore, based on the previous research, the thesis takes"Er Cheng Yi Shu"as the research subject and classifies and summarizes the prepositions in the book. Furthermore, the author describes, analyzes and summarizes its using features in the hope of making contribution to the developing rules of prepositions.The thesis includes five chapters:In the first chapter, the thesis introduces the bookmaking process and the linguistic value of"Er Cheng Yi Shu"and makes a brief review of the previous research so as to determine boundary standards of prepositions. In the second chapter, the thesis establishes the classifying standard of prepositions by adopting and slightly adjusting traditional meaning taxonomy. All in all, the prepositions can be classified into six groups, i.e. 1.place and time prepositions, 2. object and range prepositions. 3. instrument and mode prepositions, 4, basis prepositions, 5. reason prepositions, 6. involvement prepositions.In the third chapter, the thesis conducts an elaborate description of preposition in"Er Cheng Yi Shu"by describing every preposition one by one under different categories. The thesis traces back to the original meaning and conducts statistic work on the using frequency in the book, generalizing the using features and making a list in the form of tabulation.The fourth chapter serves as the comparison part. In order to reveal the development of preposition uses in the modern times, the thesis selects"Jing De Chuan Deng Lu"as synchronic linguistic data for comparison to find out the discrepancy of preposition uses according to different themes in the same period. Then, the author selects"Zhu Zi Yu Lei"illustrate the development trends of prepositions from the diachronic perspective.The last part is the fifth chapter which serves as the remaining part. It mains suggests some opinions on the grammaticalization of prepositions and speculation on other missing problems and unsolved questions.