Discovering Prescription Literature Quantifier Study

The thesis ,in which numerals .classifiers and ways of indicating quantity are depicted and counted based on the written prescription information on bamboo slips and silk, is to show how numeral-classifier compounds were used in prescriptions of Qin and Han and to reflect their value in the history of Chinese.The author reviews the great successes in studying numeral-classifier compounds of ancient Chinese since the publishing of Ma's Grammar , provides key data and research approaches and methods and illustrates the importance of studying ancient prescriptions with examples.Cardinal numbers, ordinal numbers, fractions, multiples and approximate numbers are all plentiful in the prescriptions written on bamboo slips and silk. Cardinal numbers can be picked out from one to ten thousand and be used as ordinal numbers besides the ordinal symbol word Di .Fractions have many forms. Multiples are showed in the word Bei or the multiplication and two close neighbors of cardinal numbers under ten express approximate numbers.In addition of natural units and that of metrology and container ,there are a lot of classifiers of medical terminology. Some of them cannot be found in the other documents of the same times. Action-related classifier is in embryo because there's only one echo-classifier.The ways of indicating quantity are mainly studied from the angle of whether numerals and classifiers are used or not. Classifiers are so widely used that the only usage of numerals indicating quantity is in the minority. The numeral-classifier compounds are always put behind nouns while few of them before nouns.At the end of the thesis a brief summary is given.