A Study On The Evolution Of Common Verbs In The Semantic Field Of "Shame" In Ancient Chinese Handed-Down Documents

Chinese Historical Lexicology has shown a vigorous development trend in recent years,and the Chinese language is extensive and profound with numerous vocabularies.Therefore,although Chinese Historical Lexicology has been deeply developed,there are still some unstudied or insufficiently studied vocabularies.According to our survey,there is a lack of relevant research on the common psychological verbs of"shame",and there is still a large space for research.Verbs are one of the most important categories in vocabulary,and psychological verbs are the atypical members of verb category,which have a considerable degree of particularity that distinguishes them from other verb categories.The study of psychological verbs is helpful to expand and deepen our understanding of Chinese verbs.The subject of Chinese Historical Lexicology is composed of the study of countless specific words.The study of a group of common words aggregated by their meanings such as words of the semantic field of"shame"can become an effective supplement to the study of common words in ancient Chinese and the study of ancient Chinese words.Based on the search and summary of verbs with the meaning of"shame"from ancient and modern dictionaries,we uses the corpus retrieval system to search the relevant corpus from 25ancient documents and analyze the meanings of these words.After consideration,We finally determined the research object of this thesis as"Can""Kui""Zuo""Niuni""Nv""Tian₁""Chi""Ru""Xiu""Chou"and"Tian₂".The above 11 words constitute the semantic field of the common verbs with the meaning of"shame"in ancient Chinese.Among them,"Can""Kui""Zuo""Niuni""Nv"and"Tian₁"belong to the sememe of"Kui",while"Chi""Ru""Xiu""Chou"and"Tian₂"belongs to the sememe of"Chi".This paper includes the following four parts:The first part is a synchronic description of the common verbs in the semantic field"shame"in ancient Chinese handed-down documents.In this section,we try to show the distribution of the verbs of"shame"in the documents of four periods——the Western Zhou Dynasty,the Spring and Autumn Period,the Warring States Period and the Western Han Dynasty,list the representative examples of the words,and make a statistical table of usage frequency.Then we describe the synchronic grammatical conditions of the words in different periods.At last,we compare the meanings and the overall grammatical situation in ancient times of the words with each other.In the second part,we make a diachronic description of the common words in the semantic field of"shame"in the ancient Chinese documents.This part firstly analyzes the diachronic evolution of the meaning of"shame"in ancient Chinese,and focuses on the generation process of"shame"meaning of these words.Then,relying on word examples,we analyze and summarize the grammatical structures that"shame"words could form in relevant documents,and discuss and summarize the grammatical conditions of"shame"words in different periods in detail.Finally,we investigate the changes of the number and status of the words in the whole semantic field,as well as the overall grammatical evolution.In the third part,we discuss the characteristics of the diachronic evolution of common words in the semantic field of"shame"in the ancient documents.The characteristics summarized include"unification of inheritance and transformation","gradualism of evolution process","richness and diversification tendency of expression","difference and imbalance of development","coexistence of alternating evolution and derivative evolution",and so on.In the fourth part,we summarize the reasons for the diachronic evolution of the common words in the semantic field of"shame"in the ancient Chinese documents.The reasons can be divided into external reasons and internal reasons.The former includes"the influence of social development","the influence of people’s cognition","the coordination of economic principles of language",while the latter includes"the interaction among members of the vocabulary system"and"semantic reasons".