Research On The Evolution Of The Words Of The Dream Of Red Mansions In Modern Chinese

The language of the Dream of Red Mansions is the model of the common language of Chinese in the 18^th century. The words of the Dream of Red Mansions, which exists two hundred years before, has lots of subtle differences but can hardly ignored with that of modern Chinese. This paper tries to analyze elementarily the differences from the three respects of the disappearance of words, the change of word forms, and the evolution of word meanings. The reason of the disappearance of words, disyllables only, mainly lie in "the spontaneous disappearance", "the substituted disappearance", and "the split disappearance". The change of word forms mainly include the change of the amount of syllables, the change of the order of morphemes, and the change of the analysing of morphology. As to the evolution of word meanings, this paper tries to set glosseme as a unit, illustrate with full and accurate examples on the aspects of evolution of conceptual meaning and change of coloring meaning. From this three aspects,we can see that some valuable vocabulary phenomena can provide references to the study of the vocabulary history of Chinese, and can find out that the words in the Dream of Red Mansions do has some differences with that of modern Chinese on the composing of generic words, the form and the meaning of some usual words.The description of these differences contributes to acquaint with us some characteristics of language of the Dream of Red Mansions. In addition, from the summarization of the various changes of words, the development rule of the Chinese words in the recent two hundred years can be observed, such as the word form from instable to comparatively stable, the word meaning from concrete to abstract, part of speech from verb to noun, type of expression from colloquial to written, and so on. The discussion on the evolvement rules is profitable for us to exactly understand and master the modern Chinese word system.