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Linguistic Affinites of the Yǐnwénzǐ Text in the Light of Basic Corpus Data

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2020

Abstract

A comprehensive study of the vocabulary of the Yinwenzi text, which has been traditionally claimed to originate in pre-imperial times, but evinces clear traces of later language stages under closer inspection. The study focuses on the patterns of attestation of a wide range of selected lemmata in corpora of both Classical and Post-Classical Chinese.

The results of this comparison point to a very late date of composition of the text under question, although linguistic arguments can hardly ever be entirely conclusive.