The Grammatical Research On The Numerals Of ZutangJi

ZutangJi, a twenty-volume zen records, was edited by two bonzes —Jing and Yun of Zhaoqing Temple in Quanzhou in the Nontang Dynasty during the Five Dynasties. It was completed in the Baoda tenth year of the Nontang Dynasty (952 A.D.), so it is one of the earlier existing zen annals. This precious literature had ever been lost in our country, and it was not until the 1980s that it had been returned to the mainland. The language of ZutangJi is extremely characteristic of the half classical Chinese and the half modern Chinese, and of the mixture of the two kinds of Chinese. Its language formation presented the pluralism for the plentiful absorption of the refined words, proverbs, dialects and mandarin language of the time (the Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties). It is the important datum to study the language during the Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties, therefore it has high value of language data. The paper aims to do some grammatical research on the numerals in ZutangJi and to investigate their structures, types and syntax comprehensively, by combining them with the correlative literature. After reading through the whole book carefully, I construct a numerals system of ZutangJi and depict the basic numerals, numerals auxiliaries, compound numerals and natural numerals that comprise the system. Besides, I classify the numerals , describe the four important types of numerals—cardinal numeral, ordinal numerals, approximate numerals and imaginary numerals , and construe their interior structures. Then, I analyze and probe the numerals in terms of the exterior structure, putting them into some particular structures and closely associating them with the sentence types and patterns. For example, I analyze the phrases containing numerals, parse what grammatical constituents the numerals act as in the sentences and make clear their syntactic and semantic relationships. In order to investigate some numerals of ZutangJi synchronically and diachronically and comb their historical development process, I have collected the other literature concerning numerals with the focus on ZutangJi. By comparing the southern dialects with the northern dialects, I have found out the similarities and differences between the numerals usages in the south and in the north during the Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties. The paper has employed some theories and methods of modern linguistics to analyze properly the numerals on the basis of the above-mentioned work, and has summarized some special usages of the numerals of ZutangJi.