Diachronic Study On Grammatical Functions Of Animate Noun From Ancient Chinese To Medieval Chinese

Noun is one of the three entity words. Different periods in Chinese history, the number of nouns always takes an absolute majority. Therefore, study of noun is of great significance in promotion of Chinese history. Noun not only has great number, but also has many types. In addition to general grammatical functions of noun, each sub noun has their own syntax features. We chose the noun with the meaning of life to research. The characteristics of such noun is with life activities. They can move independently, but also can accept external action. Such noun we call it animate noun. For a long time, ancient Chinese grammar research has focused on the function words and verbs. In contrast, the noun study is weak. Study of nouns scattered in a number of monographs, the system is not strong. At present, monographs and papers about diachronic study on nouns of ancient Chinese are very few. Based on this we chose this subject to study.This paper selected 10 ancient corpus (ancient: SHI JING, LUN YU, ZUO ZHUAN, MENG ZI, SHI JI; medieval: LUN HENG, SAN GUO ZHI, SOU SHEN JI, SHI SHUO XIN YU, QI MIN YAO SHU) using the methods of exhaustive investigation and sampling combined, to carry out data statistics and comparative analysis of relevant use case of animate noun and to carry out diachronic study on grammatical functions of animate noun from ancient Chinese to medieval Chinese time.Our research shows that during ancient to the medieval period, the main function of the syntax for animate nouns are subject, predicate, object, the three grammatical functions have no significant changes. In ancient time, animate noun can be directly used as the predicate of judge sentences, rarely used copula. As the development of copula, during the medieval time, the animate noun gradually became a component of predicate in judge sentences, and the animate noun as judge sentences directly start narrowing the scope of predicate. Ancient to medieval time, the phenomenon of animate nouns used as verbs has decreased, the trend of using as double element has increased, using as adverbial has slightly increased, entering into the structure of"zhu (主) + zhi (之) + wei (谓)"has gradually decreased.In this paper, research methods of combination of description and explanation, combination of synchronic description and diachronic comparison, combination of quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis are used.