A Study On Basic Vocabularies And Historical Texts Of Pre-Han Chinese

The Pre-Qin-and-Han period Chinese is arguably an ancestor of the modern Chinese languages. Therefore, as for making a fine-grained diachronic study on the Chinese vocabularies, this period must be given sufficient attention. Common words are a crucial ingredient of the lexical system of a language, and play an important role in most studies of lexical diachrony. In view of this, this dissertation, taking into consideration both excavated texts and traditional texts, aims to investigate common words of that period and some related issues. This dissertation can be divided into three sections as follows:In the first section, this dissertation argue that properly choosing and analyzing linguistic data is crucial while studying lexical diachrony of common words. It is necessary to keep in mind both the representativeness of traditional texts and the important role of excavated texts while choosing linguistic data. In addition, carefully avoiding fake texts and distinguishing different timing-level of the texts are much needed. Besides correctly understanding the exact meaning of the texts, assuring the reliability of the data is as well as crucial to making a reasonable conclusion. Only carefully distinguishing the oral style from written style, can we be able to find out the real developmental stage of the language.The second section is case studies. This chapter investigates thoroughly the development and evolution of 13 common words during the Pre-Qin-and-Han period. The findings reveal that most already-used new words are firstly attested in Zhanguo period, well spread to use in the late period of Zhanguo, and complete the displacement of old words in West Han period. Two types of change and displacement can be concluded, i.e., the old-to-new single line displacement and the conceptual generalization induced displacement. There are basically two factors to cause lexical displacement, i.e., external and internal factors. The external factors include social instability, dialectal status, and taboo. The internal factors comprise the status of sememes in the lexical systems, economic principle of linguistic communication, and the principle of being fond of new things.In the third section, this dissertation argues that the situation of historical texts is rather complicated, especially some Pre-Qin period data, which are neither written by a single writer, nor by a short period. In light of the displacement of common words, it is useful to utilize this perspective to examine the time and reliability of some of these uncertain texts.Based on the above investigation, this dissertation suggests that West Han is a transitional state from the Archaic Chinese to the Middle Chinese, and East Han is the initial stage of the Middle. The Archaic Chinese can be roughly divided into three phases, i.e., Yin-Shang is the early period, West-Zhou-Chun-Qiu is the middle period, and Zhanguo is the late period.