The Vocabulary Research Of ‘Dou E Yuan”

Yuan verse is valuable to Chinese language studies. In this article, I will analyze the vocabulary of ‘Dou E Yuan” from four paragraphs in different aspects. There is a detailed count of monosyllabic words 、polyphony words and polysyllabic words in ‘Dou E Yuan in the first two paragraphs. Besides proper nouns, there are 858 monosyllabic words whereby classified as nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.(total 12 categories) by the word class. However, there are 837 polysyllabic words including 19 simple words and 818 compound words. I will focus on analyzing the structure type and speech constituents of compound words in this paragraph.except for that there are 33 idioms, and 37 idiom.The third paragraph will be the historical levels study of the vocabulary of ‘Dou E Yuan’. I have calculated that there are 1414 ancient words, and 62 new words innovated in Yuan Dynasty, 247 old words owned the new meaning in the same period. Moreover, I have also made a comparison between the polysyllabic words and contemporary Chinese language vocabulary, briefly introduced the reason of Chinese words disappearing and transformation.I summarized the vocabulary research in 4th paragraph, and reached the basic conclusion as following: the amount of polysyllabic words are 1.4% higher than the monosyllabic words in the passage ‘Dou E Yuan’, which determines the developments of polysyllabic words up to a certain level, more polysyllabic words thus higher percentage among the total vocabulary. Among polysyllabic words, the percentage of compound words is higher than the simple words. There is a various quantity and type of compound words in ‘Dou E Yuan’. From the aspects of structure type, coordinative compound words and modified compound words are in a higher percentage than other types.Furthermore, after the historical study of the vocabulary, I found out that Chinese vocabulary development was at the preliminary period in Early Qin Dynasty, lots of monosyllabic words came into being and the existing quantity was twice more than the polysyllabic words. Since Han Dynasty, the polysyllabic words quantity kept increasing and apparently monosyllabic words became less. When approaching Yuan Dynasty, the polysyllabic words quantity took the absolute advantage in percentage of vocabulary, which was more than 10 times compared to the monosyllabic words.