The Study Of Vocabulary Of The Legal Documents Of Zhizheng

The Legal Documents of Zhizheng is the second important collection of legal documents following the Legal Documents of Dayuan in the Yuan Dynasty.This book was compiled in the fifth year during Zhizheng period under the governance of Emperor Yuan Shun and enacted around the nation in the next year.It mainly assembled individual orders,regulations and cases promulgated during the Yuan Dynasty.This book,with its focus on the social,political,legal,economic,cultural,military,agricultural,folk and other social conditions in the mid and late Yuan Dynasty,is a precious material for the study of the history of the Yuan Dynasty.The style of the book is special,for it contains both Chinese official documents and their direct translations.The language of this book displays distinct features,especially for the abundant use of colloquialism.The Chinese and Mongolian as well as ordinary,professional and official vocabulary are appearing simultaneously in the book.The book has incorporated the grammatical elements of Mongolian into basic Chinese grammar.The characters of the book have many folk expressions and errors.Obviously,this book is a rare material for studying Chinese language in the Yuan Dynasty.At present,the field of linguistic studies have failed to grant due attention to The Legal Documents of Zhizheng,and studies on its characters,vocabulary,grammar and other aspects are relatively weak.Therefore,we choose the vocabulary in The Legal Documents of Zhizheng as the research object.In this research,with the application of theories of linguistics,lexicology and critical interpretation of ancient texts and a method that combines synchronic description with diachronic comparison,on the basis of collating and recording of kyong text's The Legal Documents of Zhizheng,features of characters,vocabulary,sentence pattern,and style of this book have been illustrated,ordinary,legal and foreign vocabulary have been classified,and also the emendation and punctuation mistakes in the annotated book of The Legal Documents of Zhizheng have been identified.This dissertation summarizes the characteristics of the new ordinary vocabulary in The Legal Documents of Zhizheng,with special emphasis on the vocabulary of title,economy,farming and culture,exemplifies the characteristics of the legal vocabulary,focusing on the new legal vocabulary such as litigation,detention,and trial,and analyzes the source of foreign vocabulary through the classification of the Mongolian vocabulary in the book and in-depth exploration of the class of "chi" Mongolian vocabulary.At the same time,based on a systematic study of vocabulary by means of exegesis and collation,the dissertation has listed a hundred or so emendation and punctuation mistakes in the annotated book of The Legal Documents of Zhizheng and analyzed the cause of these errors as well as the missing and incorrect collation,incorrect recording,missing and incorrect punctuation in the book.There are four major innovations in the dissertation.First,the new research corpus is adopted.In terms of vocabulary,the corpus of the Yuan Dynasty's vocabulary research extends from literature such as Yuan poetic drama,Yuan verse and south opera to the vernacular official documents represented by The Legal Documents of Zhizheng;in terms of characters,the corpus of the study of the Chinese character in the Yuan Dynasty expands from the block-printed edition of folk popular literature to legal documents as The Legal Documents of Zhizheng.Second,the dissertation is the first attempt to make a comprehensive and systematic study of the vocabularies in The Legal Documents of Zhizheng.About 950 representative ordinary,legal and foreign words in The Legal Documents of Zhizheng are classified.These vocabularies are not only carefully described and explored on their distribution and usage from synchronic perspectives,but also examined and analyzed on their evolution from diachronic perspectives.These results are of great significance to the study of dictionary compilation,ancient books collation,vocabulary study,history of Chinese language study and so on.Third,the dissertation is the first textual research on the emendation and punctuation mistakes in the annotated book of The Legal Documents of Zhizheng,identifying and correcting roughly a hundred mistakes.Fourth,the dissertation is the first to exhaustively review and collate about 1613 folk characters in The Legal Documents of Zhizheng that are finally complied into a form of folk characters.This form not only shows the characteristics of block-printed characters in the Yuan Dynasty,represented by The Legal Documents of Zhizheng,but also broadens the research scope of modern Chinese character study.