"warring States" The Preposition Research

This dissertation is a study of the preposition system of Zhan Guo Ce. Zhan Guo Ce, the title of which literally means "The Book of the Warring States", presents itself during the Warring States Period, and owning to the fact that it boasts quite a high percentage of the spoken language of its time, Zhan Guo Ce becomes excellent language materials for learning grammatical characteristics of Pre-Qin Chinese. The traditional study of Zhan Guo Ce, however, is mainly confined in such aspects as collating and annotating texts, discerning and verifying the authenticity of the texts, and collecting missing materials. As for Zhan Guo Ce, The study in terms of grammar is quite inadequate. As a remedy of such a situation, this dissertation chooses preposition to do its research on, because preposition is of great importance within the domain of grammatical study. The dissertation makes a thorough and nonetheless, comprehensive analysis and expatiation of Zhan Guo Ce's preposition system, by doing so unearthing Zhan Guo Ce's value in the history of Chinese grammar. As to the content, the dissertation puts all the prepositions into eight different sorts according to their basic meanings and function in the sentences. And each preposition' s specific function is so laid out. Particularly, the classification method applied in the dissertation is actually influenced by Mr. Chen Changlai's theories and thoughts about classifying prepositions of Modern Chinese. As a matter of fact, applying his theories to our study is one important purpose in composing this dissertation.