The Linguistic Turn(s) in Modern China

• Main Authors: I-Cheng Lin, 林易澄
• Other Authors: Chin-hsing Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/35390512337448058290

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 歷史學研究所 === 95 === In traditional society, the order of value remains stable for a long time. Accordingly, the language that carried value is equal to the value itself and given intrinsic meaning. When the regions of society differentiated, the consistency and harmonization of value region broke into pieces. The arbitrariness and divergence between language, as the vehicle to communicate and construct order of value, and meaning, will be aware of. The purpose of this thesis is to probe into the thoughts about the problem and crisis between language and value by modern Chinese intellectuals in their disordered world. This thesis will investigate the philology, historical linguistics, grammar, modern literature in modern China, and analysis the imagination of language in their postulate of methodology and disputation of technical aspect. The transformation of modern Chinese language region is not only the variation of the style of writing, the importation of new words and concepts, and the differences between new style and old fashion intellectuals, but a transformation of imagination of language. In this time, the word and the thing separated, language was no longer a part of the system of value in classical linguistic order, but became an independent object of knowledge. In the historical studies of original meaning of word, the becoming and variation of meaning on the time axis, replaced the authority of original meaning. In the studies of structure and rules of language itself, the speaker behind language was aware of, and the harmonization of classical order superseded by the individual will of the speaker. Thus, language lost metaphysic status which connected to universal meaning, and will be controlled and defined by different speaking subjects. It is only a social phenomenon in historical time, and no longer given the norm to this world. In short, the transformation of the imagination of language in modern China is a process in which intellectuals reconstructed the connection between the word and the thing incessantly, and finally failed. After the classical order went by, the order of language (and the order of value which carried) just like the “competition of gods” as Max Weber said, became object contended and explained by vary political forces. In this aspect, this is the paradigm shift of the way by which people comprehend language, and also refract the thoughts in which intellectuals think about the crisis about disorder of traditional value.