Study On The Function Words From Wooden Slips Of The Han Dynasty Northwest Garrison

The thesis mainly analyzes the function words from5groups of the Han Dynasty wooden slips including the JuYan Wooden Slips, the New JuYan Wooden Slips, the DunHuang Wooden Slips, the EJiNa Wooden Slips and the JianShuiJinGuan Wooden Slips. And about90%of these wooden slips are documents, so this paper is mainly talk about the function words from wooden slips documents of the Han Dynasty northwest garrisons.The thesis is consisted of two parts. The first part, from first chapter to third chapter, is to sort out and analyze the characteristics of the function words according to function words. After study it, we found that there are233function words in the wooden slips documents, including154adverbs,34prepositions,27conjunctions,8auxiliary word, and10modal particles. And these function words are survivals from the Chinese language of pre-Qin period. The status of function words is close to Chinese language of pre-Qin period, but there is also a development of each kind of function word. Most of these function words have strong vitality, and some of them are used for a long period, even in modern Chinese.The second part, the fourth chapter, is to study the characteristics of function words from each kind of documents. According to the content, nature, and usage of wooden slips documents, we divide them into nine categories and analyze the function words in every type of document. The negative adverb used in almost every type of document and its frequency is very high. So the negative adverb is the commonly used word in wooden slips documents. In addition, conjunctions and auxiliary words are also a general term in that the usages of them were similar in all kinds of documents. So we research the adverbs and prepositions particularly. Through the analysis, we found that the usage of function words in wooden slips documents have two situations.Firstly, the usage of function word in some kind of document is so typical that we can find the stylistic words to analyze. Most of adverbs in BuJi documents are the summary adverb. Most of adverbs in the private mail documents are the ones that show respect and humble tone and some modal particles are used in the private mail documents. Most of adverbs in the report documents are modal adverbs and it is different from the private mail documents. The preposition "yi(以)" that introduce the tool has a large proportion in the prepositions of envelope documents. And the preposition "jin(尽)" that introduce the end of time is the most important one in the prepositions of the label documents.Secondly, we can’t find or it is difficult to find a stylistic word to analyze. It is divided into two cases in some types of documents. For one thing, although some function words are very flexible, it is hard to find a kind of function word that can represent the type of document, such as the order documents and legal documents. For another, the function words in some kinds of documents are used rarely or their frequencies are too low, so it is difficult to find stylistic words that can represent the language features of one kind of document, such as official letter documents, contract documents, and case record documents.According to the analysis, we found that characteristics of function words are related to the content, nature and purpose of the document. However, the so-called special word is only relative, not absolute.