| Subsidiary characters in the Romance of the Western Chamber, as the language component added outside the Qupai metrical pattern of Yuan Dynasty drama,are mainly used to help expressing the meaning of poems. From the perspective of lexicology and grammar study, subsidiary characters in the Romance of the Western Chamber can be classified as notional, structural and R-sound words, of which notional words are dominant. In short phrases, notional words are reflected in ten structures: subject-predicate structure, predicate-object structure, numeral structure,appositive structure, restrictive structure, concurrent structure, preposition structure,predicate-complement structure, combined structure and positional structure. The first two structures are the most commonly seen patterns. Seen from the perspective of pragmatics and rhetoric, subsidiary characters with different frequency decide on the overall expression effect of Qupai: subsidiary characters of medium frequency are the common pattern, those of zero frequency are beneficial to expressing relaxed feelings,and those of high frequency are better used to express stormy feelings. Subsidiary characters are further divided into inessential and essential patterns. Inessential subsidiary characters have three functions: adjusting the rhythm, reminding and emphasizing, and supplementary description, the use of which will not influence the semantic meaning. Essential subsidiary characters have five functions: serving as the subject, serving as the predicate, expressing negative meaning, expressing interrogation, and expressing relevance. In the libretto, such characters play the key role of semantic expressing, and have perfected the overall semantic meanings of the libretto. By reasonably adjusting the frequency of subsidiary characters in Qupai and by combining the functional characteristics of the two patterns of subsidiary characters, the writer of the drama has made the libretto of Yuan Dynasty drama create positive expressions. Therefore, subsidiary characters have gained plenty of rooms for survival in Yuan Dynasty drama. |
PDF Full Text Request