The Study On Collective Classifiers In Jinpingmei

Jinpingmei is the first vernacular novel in the history of Chinese literature. With high degree of colloquial, it reflects the language usage in the late Ming Dynasty. In perspective of grammar, it has various words formations and special sentence patterns; in perspective of vocabulary, it contains lots of dialects, jargons, proverbs. Thus it has a very high value in the field of Chinese history study. Classifier in the Jinpingmei is characterized by various kinds and flexible usage, which contains27collective classifiers. Take the27collective classifiers as the object of study, this paper completely describe them, involving overview, evolution, semantic analysis and syntactic analysis. This paper can be divided into four parts.The first part mainly introduces the general research situation of Jinpingmei and collective classifier, the meanings and the methods of research.Firstly, the second part focuses on the origin of name, definition and classification of the collective classifiers. Secondly, it gives us the general picture of the collective classifiers in the Jinpingmei by using charts and examples.The third part mainly analysis and describes the track of collective classifiers’ development. From the perspective of diachronic, the paper concentrates on the origin, semantic development and pragmatic evolution of the collective classifiers by retrieving corpus and referring to the documents.The fourth part using the modern linguistic theories and methods, such as generalization, comparison of opposites and portfolio analysis, primarily analyze the semantic features (non-monolithic, object, bounded, vivid) and syntactic features from the perspective of composition and syntactic ability.In pursue of precise, we comprehensively use the method of synchronic and diachronic comparison, and provide some practical reference to the research of classifier history.