A Study On Phonetic Variation Of Locative Woeds In Ancient Chinese

Locative words constitute the semantic field about location,including some locative words frequently seen in ancient Chinese such as up(上),down(下),left(左),right(右),before(先),front(前),behind(后),middle(中),in(内),out(外),east(东),west(西),south(南)and north(北).The change of word meaning or usage will lead to the change of its pronunciation,which is referred to as phonetic variation.The locative words in ancient Chinese mentioned above also involve phonetic variation yet few studies have done to investigate it from the perspective of semantic field about location.Therefore,the paper is going to examine the phonetic variation occurring in the locative words mentioned previously from ancient Chinese classics marked with phonetic symbols.The paper can be divided into three parts.The first part is Introduction,which introduces the history of phonetic variation as well as the previous studies on phonetic variation from scholars,bringing in the issue of phonetic variation in locative words.The second part ruminates on the usage of the above-mentioned locative words.The last part is Conclusion.From our investigation and research,we found out that phonetic variation of locative words up(上),down(下),left(左),right(右),before(先),behind(后)and middle(中)belongs to verb-noun distinction,meaning that nouns are usually pronounced as non-falling tone and verbs falling tone.However,the phonetic variation of up(上)and down(下)is the other way around.If phonetic variation of locative words in ancient Chinese belongs to word-formation as A.G.Houdricourt has suggested that falling tone is derived from the suffix*-s,then word-formation in ancient Chinese is consistent with word-formation in English such as play/player,which indicates that adding suffix*-s will form a new word.Locative words up(上),down(下),left(左),right(右),before(先),behind(后)and middle(中)all belong to this criterion.Only up(上)involves back-formation,which means that the original word contains suffix*-s and it disappears when phonetic variation occurs.Other than the examples cited in phonetic variation,locative words front(前),in(内),out(外),east(东),west(西),south(南)and north(北)do not contain phonetic variation.Front(前)does not have phonetic variation because derived from front((?)),front(前)means to go forward,from which it extends its meaning to front,opposite of behind(后).Phonetic variation does not occur in in(内)and out(外)since in(内),receive(纳)are phonetic variations of into(入).There is no phonetic variation between in(内)and receive(纳).When in(内)means direction,it does not have phonetic variation.Out(外)is a locative noun,the definitions of which refers to the extension of its word meanings,so there is no involvement of phonetic variation.East(东),west(西),south(南)and north(北)do not involve phonetic variation probably because they all belong to borrowed words,which means they do not have the original form as a character and have to borrow the pronunciation of other words.Or it is because east(东),west(西),south(南)and north(北)indicate absolute orientations while other locative words suggest relative orientations and thus the absolute locative words do not have phonetic variation.