Comparative Study On Compound Function Words Of The Eastern Han Dynasty

This paper takes “Chunqiu Gongyangzhuan Jiegu” and “Lushi Chunqiu Zhu” for example and from the perspective of comparative linguistics studies compound function words that appear in Hexiu’s annotations and Gaoyou’s annotations. As we know, Hexiu is a representative of the modern study of Confucian classics and Gaoyou is a representative of the ancient study of Confucian classics. So, the paper’s purpose is to examine differences between ancient and modern schools of Confucian classics from a new perspective.This paper bases the analysis on the standards of definition from Chu Yongan’s “Classical Compound Function Words” and the compound function words from He Leshi’s “Ancient Chinese Function Words Dictionary”, choosing 192 compound function words from He’s book and 128 from Gao’s. This paper first analyses the grammatical functions, comparing the 192 compound function words in Hexiu’s annotations with the 128 compound function words that appeared in Gaoyou’s annotations. The words are primarily divided into six categories: adverbs, conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary word and auxiliary verb, modal. Words within each category are then compared on a more detailed level, to allow more specific and permeable analysis. After this round of comparison, we found that the two note compound function words that appear in Hexiu’s annotations and Gaoyou’s annotations are indeed different in terms of their functional use. There are four specific cases under which Hexiu’s annotations and Gaoyou’s annotations used the words differently. The first is the common usage of words by both authors to take on different definitions; the second is the unique use of words by the two authors; the third is the fundamental difference in the functions that words served in the two books; the fourth are words that are richer in meaning in one author’s book over the other.This paper combines other text and materials, further explores the causes of the similarities and differences in the compound function words that appear in Hexiu’s annotations and Gaoyou’s annotations. From the analysis, we conclude that the reason for the same compound function words to appear in both authors’ works is that the two were exposed to the same language environment as both were from the Han dynasty. We also get two reasons for the differences. Firstly difference originates from the difference in the length of texts, where the length is greater in Hexiu’s annotations. Secondly, difference also exists in the way a note is made, where Hexiu’s annotations are more concerned about “Jie” and Gaoyou’s annotations are more concerned with “Gu”.Thus, we learned that from the perspective of linguistics, the differences between ancient and modern study of Confucian classics are minimal. Differences in expression are primarily due to differences in style.