Research On The Vocabulary Of "Southern Qishu"

The Book of Southern Qi(《南齐书》),an important historical document of the middle ancient times,is one of the most important language corpus for studying the written and spoken languages of Middle Chinese(中古汉语).xiao Zixian(萧子显)was a member of Southern Qi(南朝齐)royal family,he wrote the Book of Southern Qi in Southern Liang Dynasty(南朝梁).Southern Qi Dynasty lasted only 23 years,which was followed closely by Southern Liang Dynasty,therefore the Book of Southern Qi can be regarded as a historical document written by contemporaneous people.The content and time of the language corpus were consistent.It revealed the characters of the spoken and written languages at that period,which is well worth in-depth study.The dissertation is divided into two parts.The first part tries to describe and present its lexical characteristics,and then discusses the characteristics of the Middle Chinese lexical development;the second part explores the influence of new features about Middle Chinese language(mainly about lexicon)on the development of Chinese language history,which reflected in The Book of Southern Qi.The first part is a lexical noumenal study of the special book.Firstly,it distinguishes spoken materials from the written.It is found that there is much spoken language in the proses such as dialogues,imperial orders as well as much written language in the verses such as "Shi Chen Yue(史臣曰)”and imperial edicts.The general narrating language has language features of Mid-ancient History Books which contained much of the spoken part.Secondly,the research on The Book of Southern Qi is mainly conducted from the perspectives of diachronic lexical sources and synchronic word formations.From the view of diachronic lexical sources,generative pathways of new words and new meanings come mainly from compound,extension,allusion,abbreviation,and so on,except those influenced by foreign languages and cultures.Allusion and abbreviation were distinctive word formations at that time.Compared with Ancient Chinese language,the number of Middle Chinese disyllabic words had a qualitative change,but most of polysyllabic words were in neonatal period or not belong to basic lexicon.Their usage frequency was not high and did not occupy the dominant position of the lexical system.On the view of word-formation types,grammatical word-formation had occupied the dominant position,and all kinds of word-formation types were basically perfect,modifier-modified mode and coordinate mode were in top position.A large number of breeding of polysyllabic words was the specific demand of Middle Chinese.The development of the monosyllabic words had reached certain limit,it produced far less than polysyllabic words,and was difficult to meet the new demand.On the basis of the research on the lexicon of The Book of Southern Qi,it is found that some new features of Middle Chinese had disappeared in Mandarin(Putonghua),which were reflected in the book,but they had been well preserved even further developed in the modern South dialects.Therefore,the second part adopts a comparative case study methodology,selecting eleven words to compare with modern south dialects(mainly with Min Dialect),which can represent the new quality of Middle Chinese language such as "Hong(侬)","Nu(奴)" and "Tianshi(天时)”,etc.Through the research,it is found that some language elements of Northern Chinese were occurrence of north-south differentiation from Wei and Jin Dynasties(魏晋)to South-North Dynasty(南北朝),which resulted from the influence of different languages contact.And the northern language elements were inherited mostly in Modern Chinese Mandarin while the situation was often opposite in Min dialect.