The Vocabulary Research Of Works On Verbal Explanations Of Xu Heng

Xu Heng's Works on Verbal Explanations, which includes Summary on Xiao Xue, Extract on Da Xue, Verbal Explanation on Da Xue, and Verbal Explanation on The Doctrine of Mean, is a general title for his works. As a precious pre-modern Chinese corpus that reflects the exact situation of spoken language in a certain period (Yuan Dynasty), Works on Verbal Explanations of Xu Heng has cast valuable effect on the research of the pre-modern Chinese lexical system, which could compliment and perfect the modem great Chinese dictionaries complex, on words adding and complimenting; entries, meanings and illustrations appending; source tracing; origin exploring and etc. There is a kind of special words in Chinese. They are some words which are bisyllables with exchanged character alignments. Apart from depending on former materials, we can use Xu Heng's works to research this kind of words. Some bisyllables in Xu Heng's works are exactly converse to some bisyllables in modern Chinese. There might be some inherited relationship between vernacular language in Yuan Dynasty and modern Chinese. Besides that, the paper also made some analyzing of the illustrations about the dialects which appeared in Xu Heng's Works on Verbal Explanations.The article comes into five chapters. As an exordium, Chapter One mainly introduces the gist of the article, content and versions of Xu Heng's Works on Verbal Explanations, researching status in this section, methodologies used in this paper and value on researching it. Chapter Two goes directly to the function of Xu Heng's Works on complimenting great Chinese dictionaries. Based on the words in his works, the paper is trying to disclose the shortages in Chinese Dictionary, such as being lack of words, entries, meanings and illustrations, without detailed origins and even inner connections between scripts. In Chapter Three, the paper explores the exchanging of character alignments in Xu Heng's Works, identifies several groups of bisyllables with character alignments mutually inversed appeared in Xu Heng's Works, and also classifies some of them which are mutually inversed in character alignments from the modern Chinese. Coming up with the exploration and explanation on dialects appeared in Xu Heng's Works in Chapter Four, the paper explores the preserving situation of verbal language from Yuan Dynasty in modern Chinese, which in order to identify there is a certain inherited relationship between the vernacular verbal language from Yuan Dynasty and current dialects. Chapter Five goes to the conclusion of this paper.