The Linguistic Research On The Dunhuang Poetry

The Dunhuang Poetry is composed mainly of three parts:song words, Buddhist songs and folk songs, including more than twelve hundred songs. The most of songs in the poetry were created by the anonymous authors from the bottom of society. The Dunhuang manuscripts were copied by the hands of the copyist students, whose purposes of creation were not purely to express their emotions, but for the purpose of expressing their emotions and reasoning. The songs, those who were used on the religious occasions and application technologies were considered as the rhymes to memorize easily and many more songs were the master copies which were directly spoken and sung on the various ceremonies. Hence the Dunhuang poetry presented very different style features with the literati's words, and these features that were reflected in the language were their popularity. It is precisely because of such Dunhuang Poetry language style, namely quite close to the spoken language, that makes its value clear while studying the current situation of the modern Chinese spoken language. But the study found that the academic circles lacked of the centralized and systematic researches on the language of Dunhuang Poetry, especially in vocabulary and grammar. So this thesis is divided into five parts to study the language of Dunhuang Poetry.Introduction:In this part, the author mainly introduces the relationship between the Chief Collection of Dunhuang Poetry by Ren Bantang and the writing of this thesis, the current status of the research, the value of linguistic research, and the contents and methods of linguistic research on Dunhuang Poetry.Language features of Dunhuang Poetry. In this part, the author gives a general overview about the popular characteristics of language of Dunhuang Poetry, and focuses on the form of the folk discourse of the Dunhuang Buddhist songs, and then gets a general understanding of the language adjustments of the Buddhist songs used in the folk society.Words study on Dunhuang Poetry. In this part, the author concentrates the efforts on researching and explaining some vulgar words and slangs, and thus proves that the words of Dunhuang Poetry has great value in the researches on the history of the dynastic vocabulary.Preliminary study on the syntax of Dunhuang Poetry. In this thesis, it reveals some special sentence patterns and syntax of Poetry languages, such as the inversion, the share, the synonymous single, the link-usage of two-syllable words, the opposite-usage of two-syllable words, and the opposite-usage of synonymous monosyllabic words and so on. Meanwhile, many mistaken cases caused by wrong deletion and addition are revised. And it determines the status of these sentence patterns and syntax in the history of Chinese grammar with synchronic description and by comparing and analyzing the poetry languages to the Dunhuang notes, the poets written by Wang Fanzhi and the documents from ancient times.The collation and complement of Dunhuang Poetry. On the basis of the master copy, the Chief Collection of Dunhuang Poetry by Ren Bantang, the author references to various revised editions, reviews the photocopies of the original volume, and complement some pending words and some divergent revised words of the academic circles in Dunhuang Poetry with nearly half length of the whole thesis. Besides, the author has also paid much attention to some poets which were not collected in Dunhuang Poetry but could be seen in the manuscripts from Dunhuang, and the author has undertook the same supplement work. With these efforts, the author hopes that this thesis can restore Dunhuang Poetry to the original appearances as far as possible and can be close to the original intention of the writers to the maximum extent so as to eliminate the defects caused by fantastic judgments and subjective transformations in course of the revision and verification of Dunhuang Poetry.