The Research Of The Comparative Constructions On Mengzi And Xunzi

This thesis chooses Mengzi and Xunzi, the masterpieces of Zhuzi in ancient times as the object of investigation. We have a peep at the basic feature such as patter of component and range of representing the idea about the comparative constructions in the Warring States through investigating, describing and analyzing the comparative constructions in the two books. We try to show the evolution outline the comparative constructions from the middle and late Warring States to Middle Age and provide views and materials benefited by the above books for the study of the ancient Chinese sentence patterns through compare it with the comparative constructions in Middle Age.The comparative constructions from Mengzi and Xunzi show roughly the language state in the middle and late Warring states. There are sentences with adjectives as the predicates and those with verbs as the predicates in the two books. There are 18 kinds of the comparative constructions altogether. "A X yá (於)B", "A rá (如)ruò(若) sì(似) B", represents the sentence of equality; "A X yá (於)B", "A rá (如)ruò(若) sì(似) B", represents the sentence of superiority; "A mò (莫) X yá(於) B", represents thesentence of superlative. Compared with Middle Age, the comparative constructions in Mengzi and Xunzi have the features of various in type and complicate in contents.The comparative words mainly includes preposition "yǎ (於)",verbs "rǎ(如), ruò(若) si (似) "and verbs having comparative meaning. The forms of the comparative content mainly are adjective-complement and verb-complement etc. The place of the comparative item had been put after the comparative contents from the time of the two books to Middle Age, which shows the relative stability of grammar. The original meaning of bǐ(比) decides that it has more chance to develop into the grammatical mark of the comparative constructions.The development of comparative constructions from Mengzi and Xunzi to Middle Age show that semantic can restrict the form and function of grammar, while the interaction between form and function pushes the development of a sentence patterns.