A Study On The Localizers In Ennin's Diary:the Record Of A Pilgrimage To China In Search Of The Law

Up to today the earliest texts basically in spoken Chinese that we have ever found were produced in Late Tang Dynasty and Five Dynasties, and only through them can we examine the ancient colloquial language in a direct way and come to understand the general appearance of it. Ennin's Diary:the record of a pilgrimage to China in search of the law, with plenty of then colloquial words used, is one of the rare works of this kind and is of great value as historical language material. It recorded a broad range of social life, within which many scenes and occurrences were specifically described and narrated; therefore it has a considerable length so as to intensively reveal the aspects of the spoken Chinese vocabulary of that time, including the localizers.This thesis aims to give a synchronic description of the localizers in this book, including the members and their usage. At the same time we attempt to analyze the development of localizers presented by this book on the basis of comparing them with those in Tso Chuan and in modern Chinese language. In our study we focus our observation on the fourteen core localizers东南西北左右前后上下外内里中and the localizers containing them as components, besides we researched some other characteristic words or morphemes that denote position or direction.We researched the localizers on their semantic features, grammar function, respective and common collocation patterns, or syntagms containing them, and word-formation. The result indicates that a localizer framework of that time had been formed, which is quite similar to that in modern Chinese language; nevertheless the book presents notable aspects of localizers in the historical stage; At the same time, there are some characters of localizer usage of the individual author.