Research On Prepositions Of Huainanzi

The prepositions in Western Han and Eastern Han Dynasties are the inheritance and development of the Pre-Qin Period, and also is the foundation for later prepositions. Huainanzi has rich content and a complete language system, which is close to colloquial language at that time. It thus can reflect the feature of preposition development in early Western Han Dynasties. This paper describes all the prepositions among Huainanzi exhaustively and makes a comprehensive study of its semantic function and characteristics.This paper is divided into five chapters except introduction and conclusion. The second chapter analyzes the preposition system of Huainanzi. The 36 prepositions in Huainanzi are divided into three semantic domains, including spatio-temporal, ralational concepts and core meanings. Spatio-temporal consists of following, at, goal, passing, direction, opportunity, and ralational concepts contains depending, cause, range, while core meanings covers agent, object, concerning, together, saying, getting/ giving, comparing. According to this classification, we describe all the prepositions appeared in each sub system, and analyze their semantic and grammatical features respectively. The third chapter classifies and researches prepositional structures which become lexicalization according to different components. The fourth chapter discusses the development of prepositions from three aspects, such as comparative study of preposition case, closed-in construction, preposition stranding and lexicalization. The fifth chapter summarizes semantic system of preposition and its characteristics, and also analyzes the location distribution of preposition. On this basis, we can conclude that the preposition system of Huainanzi inherits the preposition system of the Pre-Qin Period on the whole, but has development on some aspects, such as the development of preposition members, the degree of lexicalization, the position of prepositional phrase and predicate center.