A Study Of Legal Words In "San Yan Er Pai"

"San Yan Er Pai"was a collection of vernacular short stories written by Feng Menglong and Ling Mengchu , Ming Dynasty. This article take it as the language material, and select nearly 500 legal words as the research object. First , the author carried on the classification according to theirs significance ,then emphatically analyzed their origin and constitution and the characteristics, at last conducted the comparison research with the legal words of modern Chinese , discussing its rule of morphology vanishing and inherit, trying to find out the rule of these legal words meaning's evolution and development.The legal words in"San Yan Er Pai"mainly concentrate in these fields: criminal law, penalty and lawsuit.These legal words are different in the significance with those law terms that have specific connotation in jurisprudential field. These words are a part of the commonly used language of Ming Dynasty. They also displayed the commonly language's characteristics. For example, there are a lot of synonyms and polysemants in these words. There is close relation between the legal word and the legislative work. We can comprehend the lawful activities, the legal ideas and the law conception of the Ming Dynasty's last stage through the study of legal words. In brief, the legal words in"San Yan Er Pai"contained the rich legal culture information.The technique includes the crosswise contact and the longitudinally comparing in the progress of the research.