Research on the Grammar of Unearthed Warring States Period Documents

Author: Zhou Shoujin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-08-01
Features: This book primarily uses unearthed documents as material to examine the development of several grammatical functions from the Warring States to the Qin and Han periods. The material mainly comes from more than ten types of Warring States bamboo slips and silk manuscripts that have been sorted out and published in the past decade. The formation time of the original materials spans the entire Warring States period and extends into the Qin and Han dynasties. The content of the documents includes ancient book copies and various practical documents; the former are several pre-Qin Confucian and Daoist works, while the latter include official notices, letters, legal documents, medical texts, almanacs, and divination and prayer inscriptions. During the research process, the dynasty-specific characteristics of unearthed documents—regional characteristics, and the relationship between unearthed documents and transmitted texts—are two important aspects that must be addressed and properly handled. Our preliminary view is that the regional characteristics of lexical functions and structural forms are the result of historical development, while spatial distribution differences can serve as evidence for the continuity of grammatical development. The basic work of this book is to illustrate commonalities, compare differences, and clarify developmental clues in documents from regions such as Chu and Qin. Currently, many transmitted classics have unearthed pre-Qin copies, and comparing them reveals both similarities and differences in grammatical features. This book, on one hand, uses material from transmitted texts to verify the conclusions drawn from the examination of unearthed documents; on the other hand, it also analyzes some variant materials between the two. The results of both aspects can contribute to supplementing and refining some existing views.