Polysyllabic Words Study Of Han Yu’s Proses

Han Yu is the leader of the “Eight Tang-Song prose masters”. He and LiuZongyuan advocated an "ancient prose movement". They not only imitated thewriting style of the pre-Qin’s proses, but also used the system of vocabulary andgrammar, so proses they created with a unique ancient-like style. However, from theviewpoint of social language, his proses must be influenced by the contemporarylanguage in Tang Dynasty. Much more polysyllabic words had already being used inTang Dynasty than ever before. Our statistics based on the research of Han Yu proses’polysyllabic words, as a way of exploring the similarities and differences between thevocabulary systems of Han Yu’s and pre-Qin’s proses, try to reveal that Han’s prosesborrowed and absorbed new elements of the language, and finally formed the newlanguage style which was different from that of pre-Qin’s.This paper consists of four chapters, the first one is an introduction section,which briefly explains the “mimetic classical Chinese” and the linguistics value ofHan Yu’s proses; then introduce the research achievement at home and the standardswhich we give the definition of a polysyllabic word. We combine the actual languagematerials with the meaning of a word, grammatical structure, rhetoric characteristicsand the frequency, totally four criteria to judge a polysyllabic word or not.Chapter II and Chapter III are the main parts of this paper. Chapter II uses asynchronic way to divide polysyllabic words into single words and compound words.Simple words contain mainly reduplicated words, disyllabic roots, the onomatopoeicwords and transliterated words. Compound words contain joint form, one-sidedlyemphasized form, predicative-object form, predicate-complement form,subject-predicate form, additional form, overlapping structure and so on seven majorforms by their structural types. On another hand, there are some special words can’tbe analyzed by structure, which need to be listed separately. So we can get thestatistics of various compound forms, and then figure out their proportion in the all of polysyllabic words. According to actual language condition to analyze, we only citethe typical examples due to limit of space.Chapter III uses a diachronic way to study polysyllabic words, according to thewords’ historical sources, put them into four ages, they are the pre-Qin period and theHan dynasties period, Wei-Jin six dynasties period and the Sui-Tang period. Thenfigure out the proportion of every age’s polysyllabic words.The fourth chapter is the conclusion section of this article. Through summarizingthe second and third chapter, and then compared with typical books of the pre-Qinperiod. We come to know the basic characteristics of polysyllabic words in Han Yu’sproses.