A Study On The Two-syllable Words In"Tang Zhiyan"

"Tang Zhiyan" is a literary Piece, written by Wang Dingbao in the Five Dynasty. Its content covers various fields such as the imperial examination system in Tang Dynasty,customs,and the anecdotes of the poet, although it consists of no more than sixty thousands words.It contains a large quantity of special vocabulary in that times which has a high value of the study of the history of vocabulary. The first chapter of the paper introduces the writer who is Wang Dingbao and all his life, the content of "Tang Zhiyan ", the edition of it and the present situation of researching it.The second chapter illustrates several lexical characteristics:historical inheritance, specialty and abundance. The characteristic of historical inheritance refers that the words of this book inherited the earlier periods’. We explain many terms about imperial examination system on specialty characteristic. In the third chapter we discuss many new words and new meanings, which are judged by The Grand Dictionary of Chinese Languages, and trace back to the origin of some words to reveal their value in the history of Chinese. The fourth chapter discusses the development and changes of the words of "Tang Zhiyan".Putting the words of "Tang Zhiyan " thoughout the Chinese history, to discover the characteristics and laws of development of the vocabulary.Therefore, the dissertation which topics is modern terms counts the words of the book and puts emphasis on completely describing and analyzing the disyllabic new words or new meaning of the book, by means of the fixed quantity statistics and static description. At the same time, it tries to find out the characteristics of the disyllabic new words by comparing with other books of that period and the earlier periods. It also points out some weakness in collecting and interpreting the words in The Grand Dictionary of Chinese Languages.The author wishes to make contributions to the research on the history of Chinese language, especially to historical lexicology of Chinese, and supplies some valuable materials and makes some suggestions for recompiling and correcting the Chinese dictionaries.