Masters, mothers and barking dogs: the lexical family of the words for grammar in China

Not all the lexicological investigations of the last fifty years have followed the proposal that the French linguist George Matoré put forward in 1953 and that Roland Eluerd suggested again in 2000. According to their point of view, lexicology should not be regarded as the theoretical study of the abstract lexemes of a language and their organization; it should be better seen as an interdisciplinary study of the concrete usage of the vocables of a language, belonging to a strictly defined semantic field within strictly defined temporal limits.1 It is an interdisciplinary study because linguistic investigations and historical and sociological investigations are both needed. The goal of such an approach is not to define the abstract content of a number of words, but to understand all the underlying meanings conveyed by those words in a given temporal span; moreover, lexicology, in this perspective, has the aim of the verification of the influence that historical background has exerted on the process of their formation and utilization. As for Chinese lexicon, in the last forty years both Western and Chinese scholars have been carrying out researches on the development of specific fields. The realms which hitherto have been studied most are mathematics, some natural sciences (as physics, chemistry and biology) and some human sciences (as law, economics and sociology). The period most often chosen by scholars stretches from the half of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century: it was in those years that the majority of Western scientific disciplines were imported into China and their terminologies were translated into Chinese. Along with those scientific branches, the study of grammar was imported as well. The matter of language in China, especially from a social and political point of view, has a paramount relevance; therefore it is no wonder that books and articles on the history of the study of grammar in China are numerous.4 Yet the influence of Chinese social and political history on the birth of the words for grammar in China has not been dealt with at length. On this ground, an investigation on the concrete usage of the Chinese words for grammar in the decades of the birth and development of its study in China has been carried out. In this contribution, I will sketch a general overview of the trends of the activity of lexical creation, as for grammatical realm, in the period 1859–1924.