A comprehensive, anddetailed inquiry into the lexical field of words meaning a norm in a broad sense in Classical Chinese, but including comparison with earlier stages of the language and also with the Ancient Greek and Roman lexicon. It is based on a large amount of data obtained from the corpus of ancient Chinese texts at Academia Sinica.
The metodology emloyed includes historical lexical semantics, theory of conceptual metaphor or etymology in light of recent reconstructions of Old Chinese morphology.