Study On The System Of Semantic Meaning Of Bronze Inscriptions In Western-Zhou-Dynasty

Although there have been a lot of research studies or monographs that concentrate on either word meaning or phrase meaning of the Western-Zhou-Dynasty bronze inscriptions, there is rarely a research effort providing comprehensive studies of the semantic meaning system of these bronze inscriptions.As a consequence, the Western Zhou period is one of the most incomplete parts among the research of the history of Chinese lexicology. On one hand, the bronze inscription thrived during the two-hundred-and-seventy-year Western Zhou Dynasty and got evolved greatly. While on the other hand, quite different from the bronze inscriptions in Spring and Autumn Period, which is a transition stage for the bronze inscriptions, those in the Western Zhou Dynasty were relatively stable. A semantic meaning system for the language used in a specific time period could be a useful tool to reveal the evolution track of that language before it grown to be mature as well as a good way to bring to light the life style, the ideology and the culture of that time. In a word, it is not only a research of the history of the ancient Chinese language, but in essence a research of the history of the more broader ancient Chinese culture as well.This paper focuses on the semantic meaning of Western-Zhou-Dynasty bronze inscriptions. 4810 bronze-inscripted articles from JIN-WEN-ZI-LIAO-KU are analyzed, including 104 in Western Zhou,2664 in early Western Zhou,73 in early or middle Western Zhou,803 in middle Western Zhou,33 in middle or late Western Zhou and 1133 in late Western Zhou. With the aid of related reference books and prior studies, all the words and phrases which have been analyzed in prior work are organized and categorized by their semantic meaning. The categorization is conducted seperately for each of the three major parts of speech, i.e. nouns, verbs and adjectives.This effort is expected to be of help to the recogonition of the inscriptions on the unearthed relics and to the future related studies. Since the Western-Zhou bronze inscriptions are part of the ancient Chinese language, the research conducted in this paper can naturally be a reference for the general research of ancient Chinese lexicology, especially their evolution history.This paper is consisted of six chapters.Chapter 1 presents the research background, the state-of-the-art research progress, the research value and research goal, the introduction of selected linguistic corpora, the analysis of the linkage between words and phrases, the preparatory work for the research, the paper outline, and the concrete research methods applied in this study.Chapter 2 lists the vocabulary sizes of each semantic category that are counted from a historical perspective, followed by their distribution over time. We have in total 1958 nouns, verbs, or adjectives, of which 1315are monosyllables and the rest multisyllables.On the basis of the above statistics,an overview of the characteristics of the Western-Zhou bronze inscriptions is presented.Chapter 3,4 and 5 each presents the detailed semantic meaning categories for the three major parts of speech respectively by means of thorough qualifiedd analysis.The monosyllables and multisyllables are treated seperately in each semantic meaning category. The analysis for each word includes listing examples, presenting paraphrases, and counting the number of semantic meanings. And then, the semantic characteristics for each part of speech are concluded. Chapter 6 tries filling the findings in the preceding research into Jin-Wen-Xing-Yi-Tong-Jie as supplements for the words listing as well as their paraphrases.