Passive Study Of "Han Han Shu"

The History of the Later Han Dynasty, as a part of official history, has rich linguistic corpora, which is worth of academic study. At present, most studies of the History of the Later Han Dynasty more focus on two aspects of vocabulary and gloss. While there are not enough studies on the grammar, which needs to be further widened. Grammar study involving wide level includes morphology and syntax. Among many grammatical phenomenons, passive study has been the focus of linguists for a long time. There are quite abundant studies in synchrony and diachrony. However, there are only a few passive studies on the History of the Later Han Dynasty. Therefore, this paper takes the History of the Later Han Dynasty as study material to draw the outline of the passive used in the History of the Later Han Dynasty through exhaustive investigation, analysis and description. Moreover, this paper will reveal the development and evolution of the passive by investigating the characteristics of corpus in the History of the Later Han Dynasty through the synchronic and diachronic comparison. The specific contents are as follows: Firstly, the paper limited the concept of passive, determined the connotation and extension of the passive and distinguished the similarities and differences among passive, passive sentences and patient subject sentence. According to the definition of the passive, the paper made investigation, classification and description on the usage of the passive in the History of the Later Han Dynasty, and drew the overall appearance of the passive in the History of the Later Han Dynasty. The passive was divided into seven main categories and sixteen small classes. In the seven main categories, four categories were typical:Yu structure, Jian structure, Wei structure, Bei structure. The others were atypical:Meng structure, Shou structure, Zao structure.Secondly, according to the statistical results, the passive corpus was studied by synchronic and diachronic comparison. Synchronic comparison was divided into three parts:the original corpus and narrative corpus were respectively compared with the passive corpus in the literatures during the Eastern Han Dynasty and the Northern and Southern Dynasties period. The overall passive corpus in the History of the Later Han Dynasty and the passive corpus in the medieval literatures were compared. The results showed that the corpus of the History of the Later Han Dynasty was hysteretic, especially the features of times in narrative corpus was slightly closer to the previous generation rather than the writer's own lifetime. Diachronic comparison was divided into two parts:one was the comparison of the overall passive corpus in the History of the Later Han Dynasty and the ancient and modernChinese passive respectively; the second was the comparison of the original and narrative corpus diachronically. It showed that the passive corpus in the History of the Later Han Dynasty had two characteristics:one was the coexistence of old and new sentences structure, the other was the significant differences in internal sentence structure.In addition, the paper took the Shou structure as an example to analyze the origin of atypical passive. It decrypted the development process of the Shou structure specifically, and analyzed the formation mechanism-analogy-of the Shou structure, discovering that the Shou structure was neither by analogy with a kind of passive nor completed at the same time. It was affected by many kinds of model passive, and completed in diffident times. By the analogy, the deep syntactic structure was analysed for a second time. The Shou structure, failing to become a typical passive, was influenced by its own meaning and the exclusion of the Bei structure.