Study On Locality Noun In "zhuzi Language Class Edits Slightly"

Research of locality nouns in Early Modern Chinese is not as plentiful as that inModern Chinese and in Ancient Chinese, except of some case studies, due to its startinglate.“ZhuZi Language Class Edits Slightly”, a book of quotations from Zhu Xi, aphilosopher in the Southern Song Dynasty, represents the typical language style in thatperiod, and as a language studying material of early modern language, it not only show thelanguage feature of that era accurately, but also is concise and convenient to study. Thestudy objects of this paper are the locality nouns in “ZhuZi Language Class Edits Slightly”.Using exhausting analysis and diachronic comparison, this paper seeks to make a usefulexploration for early modern locality noun inquiry.This paper tries to describe all the uses of each locality noun in “ZhuZi LanguageClass Edits Slightly” comprehensively. The first thing to do is to find out all the purelocality nouns “Shang, Xia, Qian, Hou, Zuo, You, Li, Zhong, Nei, Wai, Dong, Nan, Xi,Bei, Pang, Ce, Pan” and related derivative and composite locality nouns, which are57ofthem in total, and, meanwhile, to rule out names of people, places, books etc., in order toget qualified linguistic data. After that, this paper implements an exclusive and exhaustive,qualitative and quantitative investigation in the uses of locality nouns in “ZhuZi LanguageClass Edits Slightly”, and also makes classification analysis for semantic features andsyntactic functions of each locality noun. Besides, this paper also conducts a preliminarystudy on spatial semantic evolution, vagueness mechanism and metaphor of locality nouns.The whole paper could be divided into eight chapters: The introduction part includesthe choice of linguistic material data，the value of this topic, the key issues addressed inthis paper and main research methods used. Chapter1to Chapter4describes the usage ofthe17pure locality nouns and investigates their semantic features and syntactic functionsexclusively and exhaustively, qualitatively and quantitatively. This chapters includes notonly comparison analysis of “Shang-Xia”“Qian-Hou”“Zuo-You”“Dong-Xi”“Nan-Bei”“Li/Zhong/Nei-Wai”， but also synonym distinction study of “Li-Zhong-Nei”. Chapter5 provides systemetic description and quantitative analysis on semantic features andsyntactic functions of40synthetic locality nouns. Besides, this paper also covers the topicof synthetic locality nouns evolutions through horizontal comparison between derivativelocality nouns in “ZhuZi Language Class Edits Slightly” and through vertical comparisonbetween derivative locality nouns of “Shang”“Xia” in “Preliminary Investigation on Usesof Locality Nouns” and “Frequency Disctionary of Modern Chinese”. Chapter6studies onthe phenomenons of metaphor and metonymy of locality nouns in “ZhuZi Language ClassEdits Slightly”, and, through this study, finds that the locality nouns usually also hasmetaphors of time, social relationship, orders, etc. that are not related to the concept ofspace. The conclusion part summarizes the characteristics of locality nouns on semanticfeatures and syntactic functions in general.