Zuozhuan Main Body Gloss Study

Main body exegesis is an explanatory exegesis form emerging in the main body of ancient documents. It is essential in exegesis history with significant research value. Although zuozhuan is an annalistic-style historical book emphasizing on narrating historical facts, many explanatory texts emerge in narration, containing rich main body exegesis material. This’s why zuozhuan main body exegesis is chosen as the object of study in this thesis, which also gives it exhaustive statistics and detailed discourses, so as to seek the features of main body exegesis during the pre-Qin period and how it enhances the development of exegetics.This thesis is divided into six parts. The first part is introduction, which gives a brief description to zuozhuan main body exegesis and narrates its research overview. The second part expounds the contents of zuozhuan main body exegesis from lexical and sentential explanation. Lexical explanation involves ancient moral etiquette, military politics, names of people and places, divination, sacrifice as well as other walks of social life; Sentential explanation expounds the quotation. The third part elucidates the formal notation of zuozhuan main body exegesis. The fourth part discusses the method to explain words in main body exegesis. The fifth part compares the contents,terms,method of main body exegesis in zuozhuan, gongyangzhuan and guliangzhuan, so as to more completely understand the features of main body exegesis. The sixth part is a conclusion, summarizing main body exegesis’ features in contents, terms, annotation method and style, as well as its influence to exegesis in later generations.