Observation Of The Quantitative Phrases In The "Three Ancient Books About Rites"

The three ancient books about rites which stemmed from the Pre-Qin and recorded the culture about rites in the Zhou Dynasty,are very important cultural classical books in ancient China,are the Confucian classics,are included in "the Thirteen Classics".Unearthed in past three decades,some literal materials before the Qin and Han Dynasty showed that they were not pretended by specific person,and they have an important value of the corpus.One of the important means of understanding the world is numbers and amounts.Used to mark "things",quantitative phrases are an important means,and occupy the important position which can not be ignored in the whole theory of grammar systems.In this paper,we take the research direction from meaning to form, use classification and statistical methods on the quantitative phrases and quantifier in the "three ancient books about rites" and make a wide range of observation and analysis from many angles.The first part introduces the author,the spreading,the ideological content,the main research results and research status of the "three ancient books about rites".The second part uses quantifier as the classification criteria,and the quantitative phrases in the "three ancient books about rites" are divided into three categories:material classifier phrases,verb classifier phrases and time-quantity phrases.Material classifier phrases also are subdivided into the phrase composed by numeral and individual classifier,the phrase composed by numeral and the collective classifier,the phrase composed by numeral and classifier measure word of capacity,length and weight unit,and the phrase composed by numeral and borrowed measure word. We classify and investigate all types of quantifiers in the "three ancient books about rites".In the third part,we investigate seven combinations of numeral, quantifier and noun,numeral,three combinations of numeral,quantifier and verb,as well as the combinations of time-quantity phrases.The fourth part introduces the syntactic functions of material classifier phrases:acting as subject,predicate,object,attribute,adverbial and complement;the syntactic functions of verb classifier phrases:acting as complement,predicate,object;the syntactic functions of time-quantity phrases:acting as subject,predicate,object,attribute,adverbial and complement.While the semantic meanings of those phrases are different, but their common semantic characteristic is that they all represent the quantitative relation.