A Comparative Study Of Specific Interrogation In Middle Chinese

The Middle Ages has been a crucial period for the study of the history of the Chinese language.The medieval Chinese,which succeeds the Ancient Chinese and follows the Modern Chinese,presents a linguistic pattern of alternation between the old and the new,and occupies an important position in the history of the Chinese language.As one of the important types of interrogative sentences,the specific interrogation has long been of great importance to the academic community.In this article,the objects of investigation are medieval Chinese literature such as Bao Pu Zi(抱朴子),Shi Shuo Xin Yu(世说新语)and Luo Yang Qie Lan Ji(洛阳伽蓝记),as well as seven Chinese translations of Buddhist scriptures with a relatively high level of spoken language from the Eastern Han Dynasty to the Sui Dynasty An exhaustive search was conducted among them,and a comprehensive systematic description and detailed comparative analysis of the specific interrogation in two kinds of literature was carried out using a combination of common and ephemeral methods.Middle Chinese is rich in examples of specific interrogation,inheriting the basic features of Upper Chinese,but adding many new phenomena.This article focuses on the emerging linguistic phenomenon of the Middle Ages by showing the basic appearance of the Middle Chinese,focusing on the similarities and differences between the two Middle Chinese literiture in terms of interrogative pronouns and related phrases,interrogative intonation,and the position of object.This article is divided into five parts.The first part is an introduction,which describes the object and scope of the study,reviews the research on specific interrogation,especially in the Middle Ages,explains the methodology and introduces the sources.The second part systematically depicts the basic aspects of interrogative pronouns in the Chinese literature and in the Chinese translation of the sutras.From a semantic perspective,this part divides the specific interrogation into eight categories:person,thing,manner,situation,reason purpose,quantity,place,and time,discusses the special interrogative in each of the two types of literature,and summarizes the development direction of the diphthongization and the flourishing of the ancient Chinese interrogative pronouns,and the co-existence of the old and the new.The third part describes the basic situation of interrogative intonations in two kinds of literature.The study finds that although both types of texts use the five question words ye/xie(耶/邪),hu(乎),zai(哉)and ye(也).However,there is a difference in the activity,frequency of use and the collocation with interrogative pronouns.The fourth part examines the phenomenon of object preposition and postposition in two kinds of texts.While the interrogative pronoun as objects in Upper Chinese were generally prepositional,Middle Chinese is moving towards object postposition.In both types of literature,the phenomenon of the preposition and the postposition of the interrogative pronoun as object co-exists,but there are still differences in the rate of preposition and the syntactic position of the verb or preposition.The fifth part makes a detailed comparative analysis of interrogative pronouns,interrogative intonations and prepositions and postpositions of objects in two kinds of literature from a synchronic perspective,and tries to explain two reasons for the differences:On one hand,Chinese literature is written by literati and tends to use written language,which contains more elegant terms and antique usage,while Chinese translation of Buddhist scriptures use simple and easy-to-understand language to explain Buddhist teachings,with a high degree of oral language,which makes it more sensitive to language changes.On the other hand,the Chinese translation of Buddhism is translated from foreign documents,which not only retains some of the characteristics of the original language,but also bears the brand of the language used by the translator.The last part is the conclusion part of the article.In addition to comprehensively sorting out the research results of this paper,it points out the shortcomings of the paper and the room for future expansion.