A Study About The Grammatical Phenomena From 'Shui Hu Zhuan'

This article treats the language of "Shui Hu Zhuan" as its raw materials and emphatically analyses four grammatical phenomena of it, which are a series words of "Xie", "Shi Cheng Shi" as "Bao Zhi", the passive sentences which have the character "Bei" in common, the sentence pattern of "Ji Ran". First it gives the static description of these four grammatical after reviewing all the examples of this book. It mainly describes their grammatical features. Then, make a comparison between contemporary Chinese and the words of "Xie" and the sentence pattern of "Ji Ran" on the basis of description above. It also discusses the passive sentences which have the word "Bei" hi common in terms of history of grammatical development,and analyses the reasons respectively why their various features come into being. It gives the grammatical explanation on the "Baozhi" account for the occurrence.We can find that the degree of using vernacular language is approximate to that of contemporary Chinese through the analysis about the four grammatical phenomena. Please refer to the three aspects below:First, "Shui hu zhuan" is arranged and polished and comes into being on the basis of storytelling of folk actor, so there are some phenomena that don't conform to the regular grammar. It is influenced by the storytelling and uses a large amount of spoken language. On the other hand, "Shui hu zhuan" follow the principle of "least effort" (i.e., use the tersest language to express the richest content). When these phenomena come to the contemporary Chinese, they are either changed or eliminated.Second, owing to its principle of "least effort", another feature of "Shui Huzhuan" is its complex sentence constituents and precise expression. In another respect, the representation of complex sentence constituents is due to the combination of various sentence structures. It's not only the sign that the Chinese language become ripe and complete day by day, but also the sign of transition to modern language.Third, "Shui hu zhuan" forms a connecting link between middle-old Chinese language and contemporary Chinese language, the outlook of contemporary Chinese language can be found in this book, and a lot of new forms make appearance.Anyway, this masterpiece reflects the status of spoken language of the period from the Southern Song Dynasty to the beginning of Ming Dynasty in a comprehensive and real way, and it also lays a foundation of vernacular overcoming classical Chinese. It is the rudimentary form of contemporary Chinese. Social elements, such as economical development, the change of tunes, the contribution of the writers and the enthusiasm of the masses, push the written language to have the sense of vernacular in the period from the Southern Song Dynasty to the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. It is in this period that Chinese language undergoes overall development. The language of this monumental work is the miniature of this kind of variation.