A Study Of Quantity Categories In Mencius

Quantity categories is a very important categories for human beings to recognize and describe the world.The study of quantity categories has always been a hot topic in linguistic circles.It is very important to understand the system of quantity categories in Pre-Qin Chinese for grasping the development of the whole categories of quantity in Chinese.Mencius is a classic of Confucianism in the Pre-Qin period.It has important value in the history of literature,thought and language.Mencius is rich in content and provides abundant corpus for the study of quantity categories in pre-Qin Chinese.At this stage,there are not many achievements in the research of quantity categories in Mencius,which has great room for expansion and great research value.This paper refers to the research achievements on the categories of quantity in Chinese by the predecessors of linguistics such as Li Yuming and Zhao Guojun,and constructs the categories system of Quantity in Mencius by using statistical,analytical and comparative methods.The introduction part elaborates the origin of the topic and research of significance,status,principles,methods and explanations and so forth.It reviews Mencius and the study of quantity categories as a whole,and explains the differences and links between quantifier and quantity categories.The first chapter constructs the categories system of quantity in Mencius.The system of quantity categories in Mencius includes two parts: the system of quantity types and the system of quantity values.Among them,the quantity types system includes basic and derive types,and the quantity values system includes large or small,sequence and proportion of quantity.The second chapter arranges the expression of quantity categories in Mencius.According to whether quantitative words can be used to express quantities,this chapter arranges the situation of quantities in Mencius in the form of numerals and quantities(verbs)combination,and the situation of grammatical means such as parts of speech,negative form and overlapping form to express quantities.The third chapter uses the method of comparative analysis to compare the explicit and implicit of Mencius and the quantity categories in the Analects of Confucius,in order to explore the characteristics of the quantity categories in Mencius.The chapter four discusses the culture embodied in the categories of quantity in Mencius.Both explicit and implicit quantities can embody important cultures,among which the retrievability of Numeral-noun abbreviation to culture is emphasized and the stress of implicit quantities on the ideological and cultural roles of sexual kindness,filial piety,benevolence and moral cultivation.