The Linguistic Evolution of Chinese Vernacular and the Expansion of the Study on Chinese Rhetoric

The literary language of modern Chinese vernacular, originated in the May 4th Movement in 1919, has a short history of less than one hundred years. Therefore, this literary language abounds with possibilities in its future evolution, a fact not being fully studied in the past. In the 20th century, holding the views on language and literature entirely different from the traditional ones, modern Chinese litterateurs experimented boldly with the modern Chinese vernacular, thus expanding the domain for the current rhetoric study. In this thesis, the author explores the modern Chinese vernacular used in modern Chinese literature mainly from three aspects: the functions of the signifier; the linguistic defamiliarization, the jumbled use of various styles of the language, and the appreciation of ugliness; and the originality in the employment of rhetoric devices.