The Study On People Vocabulary In Shishuoxinyu From The Perspective Of Semantic Field

During the age of Wei Jin northern and southern dynasties, regime often changes, war occurs frequently and people migrate a lot. Thus there are great changes in Chinese language, especially in vocabulary. It’s beneficial for us to acquire knowledge about medieval Chinese language by doing research on vocabulary in this period. As a representative novel of this period, Shishuoxinyu has a very large amount of vocabulary which is very close to current oral language, so it’s a very important text for us to do research on medieval Chinese vocabulary.This paper uses modern Semantics theory to do research on people vocabulary in Shishuoxinyu from the perspective of semantic field for the first time. On the basis of collecting and describing people semantic field, this paper does the efforts to explain the motivation that drives people vocabulary to change its meanings in terms of cognitive linguistics and social development. This paper also finds out that Great Chinese Dictionary makes some mistakes about some people words. Some words haven’t been collected by the Dictionary, some words’meanings haven’t been showed in the Dictionary, and some words’ documentary evidence is not accurate. There are four chapters in this paper.Chapter One and Two research on people semantic field in Shishuoxinyu. Chapter One focuses on the description about the words that stably exist in people semantic field which is main body of people vocabulary in Shishuoxinyu. This chapter divides them into four parts. The first part has no clear feature, the second part has gender identity feature, the third part has relative identity feature and the fourth part has social identity feature. This chapter describes these words combining with other classical books and records in the same period trying to present the whole image about people vocabulary in Wei Jin northern and southern dynasties. Chapter Two focuses on special people vocabulary in Shishuoxinyu. They are not supposed to be people vocabulary, but in some context, they are given by the lexical meaning that can refer to people. This chapter uses two main concepts of cognitive linguistics, metaphor and metonymy, to explain why non-people vocabulary can transfer to people vocabulary. It shows that metaphor and metonymy play an important role in lexical development and sometimes non-people vocabulary’s cognitive salience is stronger than people vocabulary.Chapter Three is the diachronic development of people semantic field. This chapter chooses Zuozhuan and Shiji as two typical books in pre-Qin dynasty and west-Han dynasty and research the development about people vocabulary by compareing Zuozhuan and Shiji with Shishuoxinyu. On the one hand, the development of people vocabulary is influenced by social environment and national cultural psychology. For example, male position has an impact on "侄" and makes it become a word that uncles, instead of aunts, call their nephews. Even more, "侄" and "侄" are both used in Wei Jin northern and southern dynasties. On the other hand, people vocabulary in pre-Qin dynasty usually has many meanings. For example, "妇" can refer to female, wife and daughter-in-law. In Wei Jin northern and southern dynasties, "子妇" and "儿妇" appear and have the meaning of daughter-in-law which make people vocabulary more accurate and show the trend of disyllablization in Chinese vocabulary.Chapter Four is about the value that the research on people vocabulary provides to dictionary compilation, especially to Great Chinese Dictionary. In the process of the research on people vocabulary, Great Chinese Dictionary is used as a main reference book. The research shows that Great Chinese Dictionary has many shortcomings about people vocabulary. For example, "傍人" is not included as a lexical entry in Great Chinese Dictionary. Some lexical entries’ meanings, such as "子 女","门公" and "儿女子", are not explained well in Great Chinese Dictionary. "劫" and other 29 words have inappropriate documentary evidence in Great Chinese Dictionary because they are too late. "百姓" and other 18 words have several pieces of documentary evidence, but their periods are too long to show the whole changing process of words. This chapter comes up with several suggestions for Great Chinese Dictionary to improve itself in the way of including lexical entries, providing complete explanations and appropriate documentary evidence in order to show the significance to dictionary compilation.