传统文话的虚词批评与近代文章学的新诠

Function Words through the Critical Lens of Traditional Stylistics and Its Later Interpretations in the Early Modern Era

唐宋古文家有意识地在行文中凸显虚词的修辞技巧,使得虚词批评成为传统文章学理论的重要一环。在清代虚词阐释研究中,修辞派侧重从文气层面阐发虚词的修辞意义,其与训诂派的分化彰显治学取径的不同。在充分认知西学分科而治的前提下,近代文章学尝试以整体性理论思路揭示古典散文特点,将虚词的修辞因素融入语法分析,虚词不仅是文章散文化、笔体化的重要特征,也成为"文气论"范畴的具象表征。

Essayists of the Tang and Song dynasties consciously celebrated the rhetorical effect of function words, which made function words an important subject in traditional stylistics. During the Qing dynasty, discussions on function words had two voices. In contrast to the school of philology’s linguistic approach, the school of rhetoric focused on the style of writing to illuminate the rhetorical significance of function words. In the early modern era, Chinese scholars familiarized themselves with the categorization of Western learning and made attempts to reveal the characteristics of classical prose from a holistic perspective. By looking at function words’ rhetorical effect in the context of grammatical analysis, they considered function words to be not only an essential to the genre of prose but also a concrete representation of traditional stylistics.