A Study On Polysyllabic Words In Shuo Yua

The study of Chinese vocabulary history is inseparable from the study of vocabulary system in a certain period,and the Han Dynasty is a key period for the development and change of Chinese from ancient times to medieval times.Compared with ancient Chinese,polysyllabic Chinese words in the Han Dynasty has made obvious progress.Compared with the mature polysyllabic words of Medieval Chinese,this period is in the progressive period.At present,the research on vocabulary in a specific time period is not enough,especially in Shuo Yuan,one of Liu Xiang’s representative works in the Han Dynasty.The existing research is also mainly focused on literature and thought,and the research on vocabulary,especially polysyllabic words,is relatively few,which is also the origin of this dissertation.Shuo Yuan,as one of the representative works of Liu Xiang,a famous writer and Confucian scholar in the late Western Han Dynasty,is Liu Xiang’s own reprocessing creation based on historical materials.It has important linguistic value.Through the study of polysyllabic words in Shuo Yuan,we can see a chronological progress of Chinese polysyllabic words in the Han Dynasty and provide basic materials and data for the study of the vocabulary history in the Han Dynasty,It also promotes the study of polysyllabic words.There are many versions of Shuo Yuan.The Shuo Yuan proofreading completed by the outstanding philologist Xiang Zonglu with more than ten kinds of books is recognized as the highest level and the most authoritative.Based on this,this dissertation divides and extracts the monosyllabic words and polysyllabic words in Shuo Yuan,and establishes the vocabulary corpus of Shuo Yuan.This dissertation selects the polysyllabic words in Shuo Yuan as the research object.The main research includes the following aspects.The first aspect is the study of disyllabic words in Shuo Yuan.Before identifying the disyllabic words in Shuo Yuan,the dissertation set a standard of identifying disyllabic words.After synthesizing various viewpoints,we put forward the principle of taking the meaning standard as a focus,taking into account the factors such as frequency and grammar,and investigated,judged and segmented the polysyllabic words in the book from a broad point of view.The nearly 3000 disyllabic words are classified according to their structures,of which the compounding type is the most,followed by the modifier-head compound.Verb-object type,verb-complement type,subject-predicate type,additional type,overlapping type and other structures in the book,and compared with the Pre-Qin Dynasty,there are new developments in both quantity and form.The second aspect is the study of new words and new meaning of polysyllabic words in Shuo Yuan.With the word items in the Chinese Dictionary as a standard,this dissertation regards the disyllabic words in Shuo Yuan,which did not appear in the corpus before Shuo Yuan,as the new words in Shuo Yuan.If the meaning items appearing in Shuo Yuan do not appear in the corpus before Shuo Yuan,they are seen as new meanings.A total of 562 polysyllabic words and 82 new meanings were found in Shuo Yuan.There are 521 new words with two syllables and 41 new words with three or four syllables.This chapter mainly discusses the 521 disyllabic neologisms,which are classified according to the number of meanings.These disyllabic neologisms are divided into monosyllabic words and polysemy words.On this basis,it discusses the ways and causes of the emergence of new meanings of these new words.The third aspect is the study of words with same morphemes in different order in Shuo Yuan.After exhaustive search of the whole book of Shuo Yuan,the author selects30 groups of words with same morphemes in different order in Shuo Yuan.There are both AB and BA sequences for these 30 groups.And 16 groups in only BA sequence in Shuo Yuan.The above 46 groups,i.e.92 words,are the objects of investigation.At the same time,referring to the words with same morphemes in different order in the earlier historical records,Shi Ji(Historical Records),Huai Nan Tzu and the later Han Shu and Lun Heng,this dissertation studies the overall structure and semantic characteristics of these words with same morphemes in different order,and then analyzes the frequency and the evolution track of word meaning of these words through 14 cases,This dissertation explores the general context of the word development from the Han Dynasty to the present,and finally discusses the elimination mechanism of words with same morphemes in different order affected by pronunciation,meaning,national cultural psychology and so on.This study makes a comprehensive analysis of the polysyllabic words in Shuo Yuan by using the theories of lexical semantics and cognitive linguistics.Although we are trying to make an exhaustive investigation in the process of identifying polysyllabic words,collecting new meanings of new words and finding words with same morphemes in different order,there are still some areas that need to be improved due to the author’s limited knowledge,ability and time,For example,the comprehensive form in polysyllabic words can be further expanded,and the vocabulary comparison with other works of Liu Xiang,i.e.Xin Xu and Biographies of Women,is not enough.Due to the limited space,monosyllabic words and idioms are not involved,and the further research of vocabulary in Shuo Yuan is needed.