The interrogatives employed in Honglou meng and their bearing on the problem of authorship.

AuthorYu, Hsiao-Jung
  1. INTRODUCTION

    The purpose of this paper is to consider the long-disputed problem of the authorship of the well-known eighteenth-century novel Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber) from a linguistic point of view - specifically, through an analysis of the interrogatives appearing in the novel. Honglou meng is universally attributed to Cao Xueqin (1715 or 1724-1764 or 1765), but this attribution applies, unchallenged, only to the first eighty chapters of the 120-chapter novel. Whether the last forty chapters, which were not included in the earliest extant manuscripts of the novel, were written by him or by a different hand has been a topic of dispute for over a hundred years. Previous studies of the authorship of Honglou meng have based their arguments chiefly on the disparities in literary quality and plot development that exist between the two portions of the novel. And while a handful of scholars have produced studies of selected lexical and syntactic patterns that appear in the work, or in parts of the work, few have studied the novel as a whole or directed their studies toward the problem of authorship.(1) Linguistic analysis, if it is to help resolve this problem, must be thorough, it must be systematic, and it must consider the novel in its entirety. The present study does not pretend to do this; it presents only a note on one, initial aspect of the work that must be done if we hope to shed some light on the question of authorship through objective examination of the language of Honglou meng.

    1.1 Background

    Honglou meng, also known as Shitou ji (The Story of the Stone), is the sole major work of Cao Xueqin. In spite of this, such a body of secondary literature has grown up around the novel and its author as to have created its own branch of literary study, Hong xue, or "Red Studies." And yet we know very little about Cao Xueqin himself, aside from a few basic facts concerning his life and death. He was born into a Plain White Banner clan - a clan of the Manchu elite - in either 1715 or 1724, in Nanjing, where his family had resided for generations. In 1728 the household moved to Beijing, taking the young Cao Xueqin with them. Cao died there in either 1764 or 1765.

    Cao Xueqin must have been familiar with both Nanjing and Beijing dialects. Whether he was thirteen years of age or four when his family made the move to Beijing, once in the northern capital he very likely was still surrounded by native speakers of Nanjing dialect in the members of his own family. The cooccurrence of the two dialects - one belonging to the southern Mandarin dialect group, and one to the northern - is apparent in the first eighty chapters of Honglou meng, as I hope to demonstrate below.

    1.2 Methodology

    The method I have employed in this study is simple: after amassing the data,(2) I have classified it according to syntactic behavior and analyzed it with respect to the syntactic characteristics of Mandarin in its various stages and subgroupings of historical and dialectal development.

    The text consulted is the modern printed edition of Honglou meng published by Renmin wenxue chubanshe in 1982, edited and annotated under the direction of Feng Qiyong. This recension, in 120 chapters, takes its first eighty chapters from the new Gengche edition, an early printed edition that includes the seventy-eight chapters of the Gengchen manuscript (ca. 1761), and its last forty chapters from the first of the Cheng-Gao editions (1791). The Renmin wenxue chubanshe edition was chosen for its completeness, its reliability, and its incorporation of the Gengchen manuscript, generally favored over other extant manuscript versions of Honglou meng as most closely reflecting Cao Xueqin's original text.(3)

  2. INTERROGATIVES IN HONGLOU MENG

    In general, interrogative sentences fall into one of four distinct categories: (1) questions formed with interrogative words; (2) questions requiring "yes" or "no" answers; (3) alternative questions; and (4) affirmative-negative questions. For practical reasons, we will consider only questions of the second, third, and fourth categories in this paper.(4)

    2.1 "Yes or "No" Questions

    In modern Mandarin, a speaker requiring a "yes" or "no" answer can form a question either by adding the interrogative particle [Chinese Text Omitted] at the end of a declarative sentence or, more simply, by speaking the declarative sentence with a slightly rising pattern of intonation. For example:

    (1) Ni yao tang ma?

    Would you like some sugar?

    (2) Ni yao tang?

    Would you like some sugar?

    Both types of questions are found in Honglou meng; in cases where a particle is employed, it is either ma or me.

    (3) Ni wen wo me?

    Are you asking me?(5) (HLM 51.719)

    (4) Ni wen wo?

    Are you asking me? (HLM 21.290)

    (5) Ni hai mei shuizhao me?

    Haven't you fallen asleep yet? (HLM 82.1185)

    (6) Guniang shuizhaole ma?

    Is Miss [Lin] asleep? (HLM 83.1191)

    Ohta has noted that the interrogative particle me first appears in Song times (960-1279), only to be replaced by ma during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). In Hong-lou meng, both forms of the interrogative particle are used, as demonstrated by the...

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