A Study On The Quantifiers From British-Stored Dunhuang Contracts And Sheyi Documents

Dating far back, rich innu mbers, Chinese philology is an important part of the Chinese language. Hence, it is vital to trace its origin and development so as to establish a scientific history of the quantifiers of Chinese language. However, owing to its long history and bountiful materials, it remains immature to conduct an overall historical analysis. So we are required to lay the foundation ofdy nastic history from the perspective of a synchronic level, and thus our goal to set up an entire Chinese history could possibly be fulfilled.As a connection between Wei-Jin periods and Song-Yuan Dynasties, the Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties have seen a critical development of Chinese language. Based on the previous usage, quantifiers of these periods inherited the past and reformed the present andg radually became maturing. Dunhang documents were unearthed in Dunhuang Gansu Province in the last century, where a large number of materials from Tang and Five Dynasties are reserved, including literature works, Confucian, Taoist and Manichaeist Classics, official and private documents, as well as temple scriptures. They are rich in contents and have a complete range of genres. The selected texts in the essay, British-stored Dunhuang contracts and Sheyi documents, are served as an important part of Dunhuang documents and are grouped as counting or memorandum documents. Through analyzing the quantifiers in them, we can see the practical use of quantifiers when people made accounts or records of events then.Through classification, we find out in the British-stored contractsa nd Sheyi documents71name quantifiers, among which there are36individual unit quantifiers,8collective unit quantifiers,4borrowed unit quantifiers,23system unit quantifiers,3verbal quantifiers(2proper onesa nd a borrowed one). Since the verbalq uantifiers are too few, I do note laborate on them, but discuss them briefly in the end.The nouns and quantifiers from the British-stored contracts and Sheyid ocuments have a variety of usages, which are more and more specialized,a complete system,a nd some new development; the system of weights and measures is further improved;w ith flexible usages and oral distinctions,s ome of the nouns and quantifiers boast of vivid usages; the structure of the rules for measures is quite flexible with a high frequency of the structure of "noun, numeral and quantifier" and’"numeral and quantifier",a nd some fixed patterns.The essay is divided into six chapters.The first chapter is served as an introduction, which briefly introduces the research progress of quantifiers,r esearch materials,r esearch methods and explanations of the style.The second chapter is a study on the natural unit quantifiers from British-stored contracts and Sheyi documents. We divide them into individual unit quantifiers and collective unit quantifiers and elaborate on them one by one.The third chapter is about a study on the borrowed unit quantifiers and system unit quantifiers in British-stored contracts and Sheyid ocuments.The fourth chapter aims to analyze British-stored contracts and Sheyi documents from three planes:g rammar,s emantics,a nd pragmatics.The fifth chapter researches the mature features of British-stored contracts and Sheyi documents, asw ell asc oncludes, classifies, and demonstratest he reflected features of quantifiers and the numeration.