On Liu Shipei's Language-Literature Ideas

As a thinker who actively advocated vernacular literature and cultural enlightenment during the early period of the May Fourth Movement,Liu Shipei based his language-literature ideas on his investigation and analysis of Chinese traditional language-literature and on his political pursuit as a revolutionary.However,the great significance of Liu Shipei's interpretation of the evolution of language-literature in Chinese history did not lie mainly in his practice but in academic and theoretical aspects.His analysis of the relationship between varieties of texts which influenced and restricted each other,and of dialects and idioms as well as of the borrowed languages whose influence on the development of Chinese language generally reflected that his language-literature ideas still belonged to objective idealism.