A Study On The Pronouns In The Last Forty Chapters Of A Dream Of Red Mansions

A Dream of Red Mansions which signaled and linked the modern and contemporary Chinese is a good reflection of the development of Chinese language in the 18 th century,and it is regarded as one of the significant literature data that cannot be ignored in the study of language in the Qing Dynasty and modern Chinese.It also has a great value for the study of the history of the Chinese language.However,there are just few achievements on the research of pronouns in A Dream of Red Mansions,especially on the systematic research.In this paper,we took the last forty chapters as the corpus and the frequency,syntactic function,semantic function of various pronouns in the last forty chapters are fully analyzed by the methods of statistical analysis,synchronic description,diachronic comparison and induction.In addition to the introduction and conclusion parts,the main part of this paper is divided into three chapters:The first chapter is the research on the personal pronouns in the last forty chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions,divided into six categories: the first-person pronouns,the second-person pronouns,the third-person pronouns,reflexive pronouns,pronouns referring to other people,and pronouns referring to all people.And all of these personal pronouns are mainly analyzed and summarized in grammatical function and semantic function.The second chapter is the research on the demonstrative pronouns in the last forty chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions,divided into seven categories: demonstrative pronouns referring to the near part,demonstrative pronouns referring to the distant part,neutral demonstrative pronouns,demonstrative pronouns referring to other parts,demonstrative pronouns referring to the individual part,collective demonstrative pronouns.And all of these demonstrative pronouns are mainly analyzed and summarized in grammatical function and semantic function.The third chapter is the research on the interrogative pronouns in the last forty chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions,divided into eight sections: he(何)series,zen(怎)series,na(那)series,ji(几)series,duo(多)series,shen(甚)series,shui(谁)series,yan(焉)series.And all of these interrogative pronouns are mainly analyzed and summarized in grammatical function and semantic function.Through the above research we found that the vast majority of pronouns in the last forty chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions are very close to modern Chinese in terms of syntactic function,semantic function and frequency of use,which fully demonstrates that the pronoun system of the last forty chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions has shown the basic characteristics of the modern Chinese pronoun system:First of all,most of the pronouns commonly used in ancient Chinese are no longer used or rarely used in the last forty chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions,and pronouns which are used frequently in oral Chinese such as wo(我),ni(你),ta(他),zhe(这),na(那),shenme(什么),ji(几)have become an important part of the pronoun system in the last forty chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions.Secondly,a large number of polysyllabic pronouns are used in the last forty chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions,personal pronouns are divided into singular and plural forms with a clear function.And the two types of demonstrative pronouns headed by"this,that"show some asymmetry when they are used.At last,the pronouns in the last forty chapters and the first eighty chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions are obviously different in terms of quantity and usage.