清末民初白话报刊词汇现象研究

Abstract

The late Qing and early Republic period (1897-1918) witnessed a great transformation of Chinese language from its ancient vernacular to the modern one. Along with great epochal changes and the introduction of Western culture into China in the late Qing dynasty, there emerged about three hundred journals and newspapers in vernacular Chinese. While being mostly published in mandarin Chinese to be accessibly popular and reflecting the basic appearance of vernacular Chinese of that time, they are a rare and important corpus for the study of vernacular Chinese in the late Qing and early Republic period. These journals and newspapers, with the frequent use and popularization of vernacular lexicons, have enriched modern Chinese lexical system by exerting a profound impact on its establishment and development. However, up to now there exists no systematic review and study of lexicons in the vernacular Chinese press of that period, which forms a sharp contrast with the rich and varied linguistic evidences in those journals and newspapers. Therefore, the paper, through focusing on their types, characteristics and causes in some representative texts, discusses three typical vernacular Chinese lexical phenomena—loan words, inverse-morpheme words and word family of vernacular Chinese. It aims to provide a new perspective and first-hand corpus for the study of dynastic Chinese lexicology, evolution of Chinese lexicons and lexicography.