19世纪英国汉学中的汉语词类观——以《汉语手册》与《语言自迩集》为例

A Study on the Chinese Parts of Speech in British Sinology in the 19th Century:A Case Study of James Summers's A Handbook of the Chinese Language and Thomas Francis Wade's Yu yen tzu erh chi

从学术史来看,英国汉学家詹姆斯·萨默斯的《汉语手册》(1863)站在普通语言学与比较语言学的角度,相对全面地考察了汉语的语言现象,尤其是其中关于词类分析的许多观点都非常精到,本文将该书与威妥玛的《语言自迩集》(1867)进行比较,认为在19世纪英国汉学中,《汉语手册》比较系统地对汉语词类进行了分类,并提出了词类分类的语义功能综合标准,得出的一些结论,已达到当时语言学界的前沿水平。以此个案分析,文章试图探究19世纪英国汉学研究所取得的成就,以期对当下的国际汉学研究与对外汉语教学提供学术参考。

From the perspective of general linguistics and comparative linguistics,James Summers's A Handbook of the Chinese Language(1863) observes and studies the phenomena of the Chinese language as understood in British sinology in the 19 th century.This book especially analyses the Chinese parts of speech.This paper compares James Summers' s A Handbook of the Chinese Language with Thomas Francis Wade's Yu yen tzu erh chi,and classifies the Chinese parts of speech with the standards of semantics and syntax.It is observed that some of the conclusions reach the highest level of linguistic development at that time.Through case analysis,this article tries to probe into the achievement of British sinology in the 19 th century,and provides assistance to teaching Chinese as a foreign language.