Research Of The Empty Words In Weiliaozi

The Warring States Period is a critical period during the history of Chinese language. Many new phenomena, including the empty words, came into being during that period. The research of the empty words is always important in the research of the grammar. The usage of the empty words in the early time was complex and changeable. It played an important role in showing grammatical relationship. So my thesis is to depict the grammar objectively and to uncover the laws of grammar, which is based on the thorough study of the empty words in Weiliaozi. Since there is no article or book which gives in-depth research to the empty words in Weiliaozi in the academic circle, I try to do such kind of research and hope that the research can be of some value. The thesis is composed of two parts:1.To depict thoroughly the usage of the empty words. All of the empty words have been researched and classified into parts of speech, which are adverbs, auxiliaries, pronouns, numerals, measure words, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary words, tone words. Quantity statistics is used to research thoroughly the empty words in the book. The usage of the empty words is depicted in detail to reveal the characteristic and rule of the empty words in Weiliaozi.After the research, we found that there are many kinds of empty words in Weiliaozi, which can show the characteristic of the empty words in the late of The Warring States Period. Special phenomena of grammar can be found in the book of Weiliaozi. For example, "shao" is often used as an temporal adverb indicating the meaning of "gradually" in XianQin. But in Weiliaozi, "jian", instead of "shao", is used as an temporal adverb indicating the meaning of "gradually". It is quite rare. Also the grammatical characteristic of the phrase "digit+number" can be found in Weiliaozi. However the frequency of some empty words is relatively lower due to the short text, which may be limited when showing the condition of the empty words during that period.2. To discuss some phenomena of grammar. Some special usage of the empty words needs to be further discussed in the last section of the thesis.There are two parts in the last section:(1) the grammatical characteristic of the phrase "digit+number"(2) the temporal adverb "Jian"...