Study On The Syntax Of Oracle Bone Inscriptions

As one of the best-preserved symbol documents, Oracle Bone Inscriptions have been considered crucial historical data in the field of pre-classical Chinese. While scholars concentrate on collation, the study on the Grammar of Bone Script is more or less neglected. Therefore, the topic of this dissertation focuses on the Grammar, hoping to make further understanding of Bone Script and also help to learn more about the history of the Chinese Grammar.The inscriptions discussed here, is mainly chosen from The Great Collection of the Oracle Inscriptions and A complement to the great collection of the oracle inscriptions.After annotating and collating the data thoroughly, we will analyze the Grammar of Bone Script. Full sentence and elliptical sentence are chosen to be discussed closely.The dissertation can be divided into four parts.The first part will introduce the whole background of the study of the Grammar of Inscriptions, by which can make clear about the innovation value of the topic.The second part will have a definition of "full sentence" and "elliptical sentence", by giving different examples to compare the difference between the two concepts.The third part focuses on "full sentence" of Inscriptions. Since different parts of speech can be functioned as predicate, we will make further division of "full sentence", that is verbs-as-predicate sentence and non-verb-as-predicate sentence. Mainly used in Inscriptions, verbs-as-predicate sentence can be worthy to make a deeper research.The fourth part focuses on "elliptical sentence" of Inscriptions.And it can be divided into single-verb-as-predicate sentence and multiple-verbs-as-predicate sentence. The conclusion is that ellipsis phenomenon appears frequently in Oracle Bone Inscriptions, and different parts of the sentence structure, from subject to adverbial, can be omitted. At the end, we will try to explain why such phenomenon exist quite a lot in the level of communication theory of language,especially Cognitive Communication Theory, The economic principle of language and The Focus Theory.