A Study Of Vernacular Vocabulary In

In this paper,we take "Jingye Xunbao"(竞业旬报) vernacular vocabulary as the research object.Itslanguage period belongs to the late Qing dynasty. Late Qing(清）Dynasty is the late development of themodern Chinese vocabulary system, embodying the characteristics of the period transiting to contemporaryChinese.As a representative vernacular newspaper of this period, its language is half literary and halfvernacular, reflecting the transitional features in the process of modernization. To study the words in it isvaluable. It can provide rich examples for the study of vocabulary in late Qing Dynasty, and provide the basisfor the collation of ancient books and dictionaries. What’s more, it can provide direct evidence for thedevelopment of vocabulary. This article discusses the "Jingye Xunbao" vernacular vocabulary from the view ofdisyllabic words level,neologisms,and inverse morphemes words.Firstly, disyllabic degree. Late Qing Dynasty is the transitional period between modern Chinese andcontemporary Chinese.Theoretically, disyllabic degree should be very high in this period of Chinese, but in"Jingye Xunbao", there is still plenty of monosyllabic words. We select an article from "Jingye Xunbao" todetermine the monosyllabic words, disyllabic and polysyllabic words in proportion.We found the highestproportion is monosyllabic words, disyllabic words do not have absolute advantage. For a more detailedanalysis of the disyllabic degree, we classify monosyllabic words and disyllabic words in part of speech,wefind it is different in distribution of monosyllabic words and disyllabic words. Nouns distributes in the twosyllable words on a higher proportion,but verbs distributes in monosyllabic words on a higher proportion. Then,we compare monosyllabic word of "Jingye Xunbao"with modern Chinese, we found that most of the156monosyllabic words can continue to be used in modern Chinese. It shows that the disyllabic degree of "JingyeXunbao" already tended to be mature.Secondly, neologisms. We take the "Chinese Dictionary" as a reference standard, to find the words whosefirst instance in "Chinese Dictionary" is in the same period with "Jingye Xunbao", the words whose firstinstance in "Chinese Dictionary" is later than "Jingye Xunbao",and the words that the "Chinese Dictionary"uncollected. For the words that the "Chinese Dictionary" has not collected, we refer to various literature todefine them.Then we analyze their characteristics from the way them formed and the way they produced. Wefind that the combined type is the main way of formation.Replacing, imitating, synonym chains, combiningand embedding is the main way of producing. Thirdly, inverse morphemes words. We conduct qualitative and quantitative methods to analysis inversemorphemes words in "Jingye Xunbao". We count the number of AB-BA type and BA type of inversemorphemes words respectively,and describe them in meaning and parts of speech, then we compare them withmodern Chinese to explore the change and development of them. We find that AB-BA type of inversemorphemes words in modern Chinese save much but die less. It partly reflects the development of the Chinesevocabulary system has been relatively mature in the period of late Qing dynasty and early Republic. While theBA type inverse morphemes words whose meaning and usage are identical to modern Chinese mostlydisappeared, this is the comprehensive result of the language internal development and external social factors.Fourthly, the corresponding redundancy. We take "Jingye Xunbao" vernacular vocabulary and modernChinese words in comparison, to find out the redundant components. According to the way of performance,they can be divided into four types: Synonymous multiplexing redundancy, implication redundancy, disyllabicwords existence redundancy,and function morpheme redundancy. Then we explore the motivation ofcorresponding redundancy phenomenon, namely disyllabic is the main motivation, and "reanalysis" is maingeneration mechanism.