The Study On Language Differences In The Scholars

The Scholars is one of the groundbreaking masterpieces in the history of Chinese fiction. Mr. Lu Hsun appraised:"Wu Ching-tzu’s The Scholars is the first novel in which a writer criticizes social abuses without any personal malice, directing his attack mainly on the literati. The style is warm and humorous, gentle and ironical. This must rank as China’s first novel of social satire."Even such a great work is not perfect. Some scholars who study the work from the angle of literature put forward that:the front part and the back one are different in the style. Some fragments of the back part, like the chapters taking Guo Xiaozi, Xiao Yunxian, Tang Zhentai as the central figure, the content is rigid and blunt, lifeless, and the artistic quality is relatively poor. This part is extremely not harmonious with the integral style of the book. However, if we only investigate and hypothesize the inconsistent phenomenon of the ideological content and artistic achievements from the perspective of literature, but could not come up with reliable evidences to support this argument, the conjectural conclusion can only be a possibility. Based on the intensive research, we found in the chapters which artistic quality is poor, the distribution and usage of some vocabulary and grammatical phenomena are different.The existing linguistic research articles on The Scholars mainly focus on the detailed description and analysis, while studies on language differences in different chapters are very seldom. This paper attempts to jump out of the traditional research framework, try to take the verbal impure problems which the academia pays little attention to in The Scholars as observation points. We select more than30words and expressions,25kinds of grammatical phenomena, analysis the distribution and usage differences of them in different chapters, and try to undertake beneficial exploration about the authorship question of The Scholars.This paper utilizes the basic principles and methods of Language stylistics and Mathematical linguistics as theoretical support, with everyday vocabulary and grammatical phenomenon as the two major entry points. Comparison about the usage of everyday vocabulary is mainly from the following four aspects:"the same word with different meanings","the same meaning with different words","the same word of different frequency or usage" and "words found only in certain chapters". Comparative analysis of the grammar is from the following three angles:the differences of syntactic function and significance, the differences of sentence expression and the differences of sentence structure. Through scientific quantitative calculations and comprehensive comparative analysis, the linguistics data reveal the usage differences about vocabulary and grammar in different chapters. From the above analysis we can draw the conclusion that The Scholars is written possibly not only by Wu Jingzi.