The Research On Quantifiers In Vernacular Novels Of Ming Dynasty

Rich words and complex usage are one of the important features of Chinese,and it's also one of the key issues in the study of Chinese history.Novels appeared unprecedented prosperity in the Ming Dynasty,and their status in the literary history was greatly improved.Compared with Tang,Song and Yuan poems,vernacular novels can better preserve the original appearance of spoken language at that time,and have higher corpus value and research value.At present,the research of Ming Dynasty vernacular novels involves the theme of novels,the value orientation of novels and artistic techniques.From the aspect of language,there are few researches,and even fewer studies on the usage of quantifiers.Therefore,this paper chooses the quantifiers in the vernacular novels of Ming Dynasty as the research object,and carries out synchronic description and diachronic comparative analysis to explore the characteristics of the Chinese quantifiers in this period from grammar and semantics.On the one hand,it shows the overall picture of the quantifier system in the vernacular novels of Ming Dynasty as much as possible,and on the other hand,it can provide important data support for the dating research of the quantifiers in Ming Dynasty.We selected 55 representative novels in the vernacular novels of the Ming Dynasty and made exhaustive statistics on quantifiers among them.We found 323 quantifiers in total.We divided them into two categories: noun quantifiers and momentum quantifiers,and divided them into four categories: individual quantifiers,collective quantifiers,borrowed noun quantifiers and institutional quantifiers,with 289 quantifiers(except borrowed noun quantifiers).Momentum words are divided into two categories: special momentum words and borrowed momentum words,of which 34 are special momentum words.This article is divided into six chapters to analyze and study these quantifiers in vernacular novels of Ming Dynasty.The introduction part mainly summarizes the current research situation of quantifiers in the Ming Dynasty in the grammar circle,corrects and classifies quantifiers based on the definitionand classification of quantifiers by predecessors and sages,and finally briefly introduces the corpus and research methods selected in this paper.The first to fourth chapters are the study of quantifiers in vernacular novels of Ming Dynasty,describing quantifiers in vernacular novels of Ming Dynasty in detail and studying their diachronic development and changes.According to statistics,we found 323 classifiers in vernacular novels of Ming Dynasty(excluding borrowed nominal classifiers and borrowed momentum words),of which 289 are nominal classifiers: 170 are individual classifiers,82 are collective classifiers and 37 are institutional classifiers.There are 34 special momentum words.We first define each category of quantifiers,then further divide them into different sub-categories from different angles according to the characteristics of each category of quantifiers,and finally analyze each quantifier in turn according to the sub-categories.The fifth chapter studies the quantitative representation of vernacular novels in Ming Dynasty.First of all,we divide the quantity representation into two categories: the quantity representation and the momentum representation.Then,according to their different combinations,the two categories are further classified and the quantity and momentum representations are listed respectively.We select 20 of the 55 vernacular novels of the Ming Dynasty(5 in the early and middle Ming Dynasty and 15 in the late Ming Dynasty)to make exhaustive statistics on the quantity representations and calculate various frequencies.The total quantity representations are 41,645 cases and momentum representations are 7,893 cases.Finally,by examining the quantitative expressions in the vernacular novels of the Ming Dynasty and comparing them in the diachronic background,this paper summarizes their characteristics and draws the conclusion that the quantitative expressions in the vernacular novels of the Ming Dynasty have gradually matured and perfected.The sixth chapter examines the characteristics of quantifiers in vernacular novels of the Ming Dynasty,mainly examining the grammatical and semantic characteristics of noun quantifiers and momentum words,and finds 36 new quantifiers in the Ming Dynasty,of which25 new quantifiers and 9 new quantifiers are of lexicographical value.We discuss the grammatical features of quantifiers from the two aspects of word formation features andsyntactic functions,and discuss the semantic features of quantifiers from the perspective of dynamic quantifier research theory.Through analysis,we can draw the following conclusions:the combination ability of quantifiers in vernacular novels of Ming dynasty is further developed than before.the lexical aspect is highlighted by the higher frequency of "a-a" reduplication.nine noun quantifiers and four momentum words can enter this format,and the homomorphic momentum words have been greatly developed.A large number of verbs can enter the homomorphic momentum form,making it an open system.many of them are disyllabic words,and the auxiliary word "le" and object can also be added to their forms.in addition,the compound words "quantity+quantity" and "noun+quantity" are further developed in vernacular novels of Ming dynasty.Syntactic aspects are highlighted in the phenomenon of noun quantifiers being used together and the situation of "number+quantity+noun" being used as attributive and adverbial.In the appendix section,all the quantifiers in the vernacular novels of Ming Dynasty are collected and made into a quantifier list of novels of Ming Dynasty,so as to show each kind of quantifiers intuitively and briefly introduce the literature versions of vernacular novels of Ming Dynasty used in this article.