KJCKorea
Journal Central

This study focuses on the phenomenon of the revival of rare Chinese characters (生僻字) in contemporary China. It analyzes the causes behind this phenomenon and examines the meanings and uses of rare characters that have been resurrected and are currently in use. The revival of rare characters is analyzed from two perspectives: iconicity and China's language policies. Iconicity demonstrates how the intuitive connection between a character’s form and meaning enables rare characters to be effectively used in modern communication. Additionally, the Chinese government has actively promoted the preservation and standardization of rare characters through digitization, laying the groundwork for their modern application while ensuring the continuation of traditional script. This study reveals that the revival of rare characters is not merely a restoration of the historical writing system but a process in which these characters are semantically adapted or newly utilized to fit contemporary communication contexts. It illustrates how Chinese characters bridge tradition and modernity, highlighting their potential to serve as practical linguistic resources with enduring value in a rapidly changing era.

This study examines the syntactic status of the ‘V+个+NumP’ construction in Modern Chinese and aims to clarify its unique pragmatic meaning. The ‘V+个+NumP’ construction exhibits distinctive characteristics through the extension of the verb category and the diversity of quantification structures, with specific constraints on the distribution of the object noun. Additionally, this construction expresses modality with certain restrictions and primarily appears in the irrealis and habitual aspects. From a pragmatic perspective, the selection of the ‘V+个+NumP’ construction is preferred for expressing abstract quantities through subjective interpretations of quantity. This construction has strong colloquial characteristics and conveys a light, informal tone. The main mechanism behind the generation of this construction is the metaphorical extension from quantity to degree, which is realized through subjectification. Finally, the appropriateness of the construction is confirmed by comparing it to similar constructions in terms of form.

The Oracle bone inscriptions, the oldest existing Chinese research material, is a treasure trove of ancient language research. However, in order for the Oracle bone inscriptions to guarantee its value as a data, accurate decoding of the sacrificial inscriptions must precede, and in decoding the sacrificial inscriptions, it is the most basic to grasp the meaning of the letter and distinguish between parts of speech and reading the shape of the letter. Therefore, in this paper, all sacrificial inscriptions in which "fa(伐)" appears were extracted, and the parts of speech were analyzed by studying the remaining "fa(伐)" except for "fa(伐)" of the sacrificial inscriptions related to conquest.The part of the extracted data, "fa(伐)", was divided into those with and without labeling components, and the part of the text was confirmed through the method of literary analysis. When analyzing literary examples, the sacrificial inscriptions of Duizheng(對貞) and Xuanzheng(選貞) were compared in consideration of the characteristics of the sacrificial inscriptions, and the sacrificial inscriptions of the same Oracle bone inscriptions piece and similar acrificial inscriptions were used to compare them together, and it was revealed what distributional characteristics were seen by classifying the sacrifical verbs that were combined for each part of speech.