A Study Of Color Words In Vernacular Short Stories Of The Ming Dynasty

Color words are an important part of the study of Chinese vocabulary,with strong markers and high frequency of use.The use of color words in Ming Dynasty vernacular short stories is abundant,with obvious linguistic transitional features in usage and a strong intergenerational character,which is an important corpus for studying the development and evolution of Chinese vocabulary in ancient and modern times.Through an exhaustive statistical analysis of all the color words in Ming vernacular short stories,we present an overview of the color word system in Ming vernacular short stories and further discuss the cultural connotations reflected by the color words in Ming vernacular short stories,which is of great significance to people’s understanding and appreciation of Ming culture.This paper selects 22 published Ming vernacular short story collections as a source of corpus,and conducts an exhaustive statistical analysis of the color words appearing in them,concluding that the color words in Ming vernacular short stories can be roughly divided into nine categories: red,white,yellow,black,green,blue,purple,gray,and brown,with a total of 218 color words.Among them,there are 9prototypical color words and 209 non-prototypical color words,which can be subdivided into 189 non-prototypical semantic color words and 20 pragmatic color words.In this paper,all the color words appearing in Ming vernacular short stories are carefully examined and analyzed from three aspects: the use of color words,the semantic system of color words and the semantic effect of color words:The first chapter is the introductory part,which introduces the current status of language research on Ming vernacular short stories and the research overview of Chinese color words,organizes the current status of research on Ming color words,elaborates the research purpose and significance of the article,and further discusses the research content of this paper on this basis,and makes some relevant explanations on the research object,corpus building,color word definition and research methods of this paper.Chapters 2 to 4,which are the key parts of the whole paper.Chapter 2 analyzes the color words of Ming vernacular short stories from a macroscopic perspective,grasps the overall situation of color words,and identifies the prototypical color words of each category based on the frequency of use and collocation ability of color words in the corpus.Chapter 3 combines the theories of color word semantic analysis and focuses on describing the semantic system of the prototypical color words in nine major categories,while analyzing the additional meanings of non-prototypical semantic color words and pragmatic color words in specific contexts from the perspective of additional meanings,and conducting a comprehensive analysis of the frequency of use of color words in three major collocation domains in order to present an overview of the color word system in Ming dynasty vernacular short stories.Chapter 4 analyzes and discusses the pragmatic effects of semantic color words,pragmatic color words,semantic color words and pragmatic color words in Ming vernacular short stories from a pragmatic perspective,in which the combination of semantic color words with nouns can be divided into superimposed forms and the pragmatic effect of modifying the same thing,and color words in different categories can also be combined with the same noun to modify the same thing.This is followed by a further analysis of the cultural connotations reflected in the color words of Ming vernacular short stories,which is of great significance for a comprehensive understanding and appreciation of Ming culture.Chapter 5 is the concluding section,which organizes and summarizes the basic conclusions of the main part.The innovation of the article is that the color words are considered and analyzed in a system,which not only presents a comprehensive and systematic overview of the color words in Ming Dynasty vernacular short stories,but also provides valuable corpus for the construction of a modern Chinese color word research system,with a view to enriching the research results of modern Chinese color words.In addition,an exhaustive statistical analysis of color words is conducted to illustrate the use of color words with data,which is more accurate and rigorous.This paper points out that among the color words in Ming vernacular short stories,the three categories of red,white,and black are the most commonly used,constituting the main part of the color words in Ming vernacular short stories.Among them,the variety and number of color words in the red category ranked first among all the color categories,which is related to the traditional culture of the Han Chinese people to be red.