A Study On Ancient Legal Inscriptions Of Southwest China

Legal inscriptions are the steles which documented legal clauses. Legal inscriptions are faithful and reliable, and there’s a large amount of legal inscriptions in southwest China. Those legal inscriptions carried both official and unofficial laws that can help us to study the politic, economy, folklore, culture and the development of southwest China. Currently, scholar rarely studies the legal inscriptions of southwest China in the view of legal language.The thesis is based on the legal inscriptions of southwest China. After having collected and organized them, we selected legal terms and explained them in detail, in order to supply and revise the Han Yu Da Ci Dian and other dictionaries. In the meanwhile, we also can learn the folklore and the law culture of southwest China, and enrich the Chinese Lexicology and the Chinese Vocabulary History.The thesis contains six chapters. The introduction introduced the materials, the reason why we selected this subject, and the study which is already done by other scholars. The Chapter II to Chapter V is the main part of the thesis, in which we analyzed the case formula terms, legal certificate terms, appellation terms and document format terms. We divided each chapter according to the difference of the terms, and explained the terms in combination with other documents. And in the end of each chapter of this part, we make a conclusion and analysis the terms in theory. In Chapter A/I we explored the culture of southwest China.In the epilogue, we point out some shortcomings in Han Yu Da Ci Dian and the unsoveled puzzles in the papers.