Study Of The Folk Vulgarism In The Water Margin

The Water Margin, the novel of Ming Dynasty, one of the four masterpieces of ancient China as well as the first colloquial saga novel, has long been regarded as the paradigm of popular language. It pushed the language art of Chinese popular novels onto the zenith. About five hundred vulgarisms in narrative and character language reflect this true-life folk achievement. Mr. Li Zhitian praised it as "Riverside Scene at Tomb-Sweeping Festival" (a famous picture). The great numbers of vulgarisms used in the novel, vital and characteristic, to a great degree embodies the language features of that time. Based on the collected vulgarisms in the novel, the paper described and analyzed the origins, contents and the reflected cultural connotations, semantics and rhetoric of the folk vulgarisms. It attempted to explore the evolutive trend of the vulgarism by longitudinal contrast. The methods of contrast, statistics and cognition were adopted.