《上博簡》孔子語錄文介詞“於”字用法考

Abstract

In 1994， Shanghai museum salvaged a batch of bamboo slips from Hang Kong Cultural relics market， which was unearthed in Chu region， and could be dated from the warring states period. This batch of bamboo slips includes more than 100 kinds of Warring States books， most of which is percious document not passing from generation to generation， including Confucianism， Taoism， Militarism and other types of precious document. Out of the batch of bamboo slips， there are dozens of document related to Confucius'speech. There have been 15 kinds of the document that have been released already. Preposition’Yu於’inConfucius’speech inscribed in Chu Bamboo slips stored in Shanghai Museum mainly introduces volatile components and related components. In the structure ‘Verb+Yu於+Object’， volatile components are mainly personal pronoun， while related components are mainly nouns and a few place nouns and verbs. The object introduced by preposition 'Yu於' contain the meaning of venerating and respecting. In the structure ‘Adjective+ Yu於+Object’， comparative components have the meaning of comparing. Preposition ‘Yu於’ introduces the place that the action takes place. When Confucius preached morality， he used Yayan (elegant language of scholars)， a very common language at that time， which presents a systematic character of the social language in that time. Thus， in Confucius’ speech， ‘Yu於’ and ‘Yu於’ are not the variant forms of the characters， but two prepositions with different usage. Discovering function words which used to exist in Old Chinese but not in current documents from unearthed data has significant research value.