The Study On The Classifiers In Juyan Hanjian

Classifier (CL) is one of the important features of Han-Tibet language families. It was not an existed grammatical category, but emerged, developed and established in the long history of Chinese language. Han Dynasty was the period when Chinese CL began developing towards establishment It must have positive meaning for the studies on the history of Chinese language to probe into the development of the CL of this period deeply.This thesis focuses on Juyan Hanjian (short for JH------the inscriptions that werecarved on the two series of wooden slips of Han Dynasty, which were excavated from Juyan, Gansu Province), and takes modem lexicology and semantics as the theory foundation to study the CL confined in Juyan Hanjian.The thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter One surveys the CL in JH generally and counts up the total number of CL in JH that includes 85 noun-classifiers (N-CL) and 4 verb-classifiers (V-CL). Chapter Two, from the syntagmatic and paradigmatic approaches, analyzes the selection relations between N-CL and nouns (N), generalizes-the distributive features of the N-CL in JH, and holds that co-existence semantic components rule is the main element which restricts the collocation of the N-CL and N. There must be some co-existence semantic components between N-CL and N when they collocate, even if some of the semantic components are indistinct. Chapter Three, under the theoretical guide of modem lexicological semantics, applies the approach of componential analysis to analyze the semantic evolution and semantic features of N-CL in JH, advocates that contextual semantic change was one of the reasons that result in the semantic evolution of N-CL.N-CL came form N, but the sepecific meaning of the N was desalinated in the course, and only reserved the semantic component that referred to the classification the N belonged to. This reserved semantic component embedding into the CL sememe marked the range the CL could match. This part also includes the discussion about the influence on the semantic evolution of CL that was exerted by the mode of thought of Han nation. Chapter Four explores the reason why the V-CL emerged by analyzing the sentence semantic and the development of the sentence structure. Chapter Five describes those CL concisely which were symbolized by the same character but referred to different meanings, and diachronically compares the features of the CL in JH briefly with those of pre-Qin and Weijin periods.