The Historical Evolution Of The Commonly Used Words Indicating "Sleeping"

In the circle of the Chinese lexicon history, studies on the history of the lexical evolution of commonly used words have proved to be crucial in carrying on the Chinese Lexicon history research amongst which individual studies play an essential part. Despite that increasing importance has been attached to the study on commonly used words by the academic circle, and that a great amount of individual studies have been emerging recently, we are still obliged to spare no effort in this regard. Just as Jiang Shaoyu argued that "Simultaneous tasks must be assumed in a couple of aspects in order to push ahead the Chinese historical lexicon studies. In the first aspect, an exhaustive clarification of every single word from Qin to Ming & Qing Dynasties, and a better, general understanding of the lexicon in every historical period." Wang Weihui also reckoned that the diachronically based study on commonly used words should be strengthened without delay; And for the time being, more concretely, great amounts of individual researches are especially needed.Having acknowledged the above, based on the differentiation that has been conducted by Wang Li among "qin, wo, midn, mei, shui", this thesis selects seven commonly used words rather typical in the semantic field of "sleeping", they being "qi n, wo, midn, mei, shui, wu, and jiao". In doing so, the thesis bases the statistics, description, and analyses of the seven words on the enormous corpus constructed to have contained a great deal of materials dating from Pre-Qin to Sui, Tang and the Five Dynasties, with the expectation of providing some authentic and reliable material and observation to further studies on the Chinese lexicon history.This thesis mainly deals with the process of development and evolution of the said group of words from Pre-Qin to Sui, Tang and the Five Dynasties, which in our rendering, falls into four periods. In Pre-Qin Periods, the correlation between word choices and their respective semantic units in the semantic fields were comparatively recognizable. "Qin" denoted "to sleep", "mei" meant "to fall asleep", and "wu" stood for "to awake from sleeping"; and simultaneously, " jiao" implied minor amount of sleeping, and "shui", interestingly, indicated "to be sleepy". More dramatic changes in semantic field system occurred in the West and East Han Dynasties when "wo", in place...