The Semantic Analysis And Rhetoric Interpretation Of "Yu" And Its Formation In Complete Tang Poems

This paper is based on "Yu" and its reference words as the research object,taking the Complete Tang Poems as the closed corpus.The author is targeted at researching in semantic analysis and rhetorical interpretation via various methods including data statistics,comparative analysis,case investigation,theory verification and classification reasoning analysis to investigate the semantic situation of the reference words as well as rhetorical phenomenon of "Yu" appearing in the Complete Tang Poems.The research of this paper mainly has three aspects:1)to investigate the ’Yu’ and its reference words in the Complete Tang Poems and analyze the semantic field according to the modern semantic theory;2)to explore the rhetorical generation and extension of ’Yu’and its sememes of reference words;3)to analyze the rhetorical symbols of ’Yu’ on the basis of generalized rhetoric.This paper is divided into five parts.The part of Introduction classified and generalized the results of existing research of’Yu’ and its reference words from different perspectives and found that the present studies rarely investigate ’Yu’ and its semantic field of word formation in a systematic way.Those researches also lack the perspective of rhetoric to explore the semantic variation in specific language environment,which is a breakthrough point of the research of this paper.In other words,this paper is concentrated on the points of semantic and rhetoric.Chapter one investigates ’Yu’ and its reference words in specific context in the Complete Tang Poems on the basis of referring to dictionary interpretation.Then,the semantics of ’Yu’ and its reference words are divided into two categories including ’Bird Semantic Filed’ and ’Human Semantic Field’.’Bird Semantic Filed’ can be divided into three sub-semantic fields:feather,wing and bird,which can be established,step by step,from the lower semantic field to the minimum semantic field.’Human Semantic Field’ is divided into five sub-semantic fields:human life,production tools,characters,places,music,dance art and human movement.The second chapter explores and analyzes the rhetoric creation or extension of ’Yu’and its reference words.It is found that there are totally 58 sememes derived and extended from rhetorical approach.To be more specific,there are 11 generated from allusions,1 from ministry,38 from metonymy extension,8 metaphor implication.Among them,the metonymy extension consists of three extended approach,including semantic extension,the extension of alleged object of sememes,the extension of the variation of the grammatical properties.In chapter three,the analysis of the rhetorical symbols of ’Yu’ is given.There are four types of rhetorical symbols:1)a bird with a symbol of luckiness compares to a man who is virtuous and gifted;2)a bird’s feather or wing represent one’s political power,ability,talent and reputation;3)a bird’s wing figuratively refers to one’s prosperous career;4)the meaning of less feather and poor appearance of a bird is used to metaphor for a man with poor capability.The aesthetic psychology and ideological culture of ancient Chinese behind these rhetoric symbol will be analyzed in the following.The final chapter summarizes the main points and shortcomings of this paper.There are 57 sememes in ’Bird Semantic Filed’ and 91 sememes ’Human Semantic Field’.These subordinate semantics can reflect bird feather was an important material in the production and living activities of human beings in the Tang dynasty.Besides,disyllabic words in Tang dynasty gradually became the mainstream of Chinese vocabulary.The sememes of words could not be generated without the intervention of rhetoric.Moreover,the worship pf birds and the thought of ’official standard’ have obvious influence on the development of Chinese national language.It is hoped that the attempt of this paper can provide a superficial case study for the research of ’semantic and rhetorical’ language.