"Ya Hermeneutics" Lexical Semantics Research

Er Ya(尔雅)is the first exegetics book in the history of Chinese linguistics, and Er Ya Yi Shu(尔雅义疏)is one of the most academic valuable masterpieces among the annotated books of Er Ya, and is a rare cultural treasure in the history of Chinese linguistics. Chinese lexical semantics is evolved from traditional exegetics, and traditional exegetics provide vast amounts of semantic material to the Chinese lexical semantics. Therefore, on the basis of a close relationship between Chinese exegetics and Chinese lexical semantics, combined with the semantic materials in Er Ya Yi Shu, in this thesis the author intends to review the linguistics academic achievements of Er Ya Yi Shu with the research methods of Chinese lexical semantics, from the perspective of lexical semantics.This paper consists of seven parts.The introduction part. This part describes the origin and the author of Er Ya Yi Shu, and then introduces the main content and research achievements of Er Ya Yi Shu. This part also explains the cause, research focus points and research method of this thesis.Chapter One is "The logical relationship between the pattern, the pronunciation and the meaning of a word". This part introduces the method used by Hao Yixing(郝懿行),and that is "obtaining the word meaning according to their pronunciation"(因声求义).Hao Yixing especially attached more importance to the relationship between the pronunciation and the meaning. This part also shows the practice of this method from two aspects:the same word with different patterns, and the different words with the same origin.Chapter Two is "The components of the glosseme(义位)”.The meaning of ancient Chinese word is composed of classified sememe and restricted sememe. Two kinds of sememe existed greatly in Er Ya and Er Ya Yi Shu. Hao Yixing found out there’re several kinds of special restricted sememe. This part also intends to discuss the long-standing Chinese Sememe analysis from two aspects:the ideographic function of Chinese characters and the human cognitive style.Chapter Three is "The development of glosseme". It is Er Ya’s arrangement style that makes Hao Yixing studied the development of the glosseme not from original meaning to the developed meanings, but in a manner that putting all the glossemes of a word together. Hao Yixing not only deduced the original meaning and the developed meanings, but also found out several development rules. We can also find out two kinds of factors that cause the development of the glosseme during his descriptions:the external objective factors and human subjective factors.Chapter Four is "Semantic field(glosseme system)". Hao Yixing demonstrates amount of semantic field in Er Ya Yi Shu, and there’re several kinds of semantic field in Er Ya Yi Shu. This part also intends to discuss the semantic structure feature and cognitive feature of the semantic field.Chapter Five is "Glosseme and context". Hao Yixing paid more attention to study the relationship between the language and the linguistics. He made a distinction between the meaning and paraphrase, and summed up there’re three phenomena in Er Ya Yi Shu:different meanings with different paraphrases, different meanings with the same paraphrase, the same meaning with different paraphrases. Hao Yixing delineated the meaning of the word in context from the writing style, different editions, parallel sentences, collocation rule and so on. The term of "Dui Wen"(封文)and "San Wen"(散文) is also used by Hao Yixing to display the change of the meaning in different context.The conclusion part. Er Ya Yi Shu has breakthroughed the method of the traditional study in word meaning, and has reflected some thought and method of Chinese lexical semantics to some extent. This book is an unconscious application with the theory of Chinese lexical semantics, and has theoretic value and material value in re-establishing Chinese lexical semantics.