A Study Of The Monosyllabic-Verb Synonyms In Mencius

Mencius, as one of the most representative prose-style books of China in pre-Qin era, with plain, vivid, rich and normative words and reliable language materials, is one of the representative books that can reflect the actual face of Chinese in the Warring States period, and provide valuable information that are available for the ancient Chinese grammar studies. There are lots of synonyms in this book, which makes its expression precise, vivid and visual, reflects the meticulosity of the author's thinking, and at the same time also shows the abundance and preciseness of the language of that era.This paper tries to study the monosyllabic-verb synonyms in Mencius, comb them completely, summarize 112 groups of them, and select 15 more representative groups of them to analyze, in the hope of displaying them in the book objectively and comprehensively, having a more clear understanding of the characteristics of the language in Mencius' time, and providing some available information and theories for ancient Chinese studies in pre-Qin era.The first chapter first gives a general introduction of past and present studies of ancient Chinese synonyms, and then focuses on the author's view on the three basic questions of the studies, that is, the definition of synonymy, the method of defining synonyms, and the method of analyzing them. The author defines synonymy as: without phonetic sources, an integration of words with at least one of common meanings and the same part of speech.The second chapter lists 112 groups of monosyllabic-verb synonyms in Mencius with the use of the ancient Chinese synonymy theory stated above, based on the text of Mencius, and then selects 15 more representative groups of them to conduct a comprehensive analysis. There are mainly nine different aspects: meaning emphasis, illocutionary act, locution act, relation between illocution and locution, way of behavior, degree of behavior, syntactic function, collocative meaning, as well as affective meaning.The third chapter, based on the use and distribution of monosyllabic-verb synonyms in Mencius, analyzes the characteristics of them from two aspects (composition and formation of them). From the aspect of the composition of the quantity and classification of them, different types of them are unbalanced, and from the aspect of the formation of them, there are both subjective and objective factors.The fourth chapter, compared with the characteristics of the monosyllabic-verb synonyms in Mencius, focuses on the rhetoric roles of them. There are three roles: to make expression accurate and vivid, to avoid repetition and monotony, and to achieve tidy form and coordinate rhythm.