Jiang Yin commented on Grammar and Poetry: A Powerful Expansion of Linguistic Criticism of Classical Poetry

Grammar and Poetry (Vol. 1 and 2), by Cai Zongqi, Zhonghua Bookstore, October 2021, 670 pp. 78.00 yuan

Now it seems that the reform and opening up at the end of the 1970s brought a mixture of sadness and joy to the study of domestic literature. It is gratifying that literary studies bid farewell to a single political standard and returned to the focus on literary art forms; but at the same time, regrettably, this concern has not yet developed into a deep, mature textual study, and it has quickly been suppressed by the fashion of cultural studies. As a result, the study of literature itself has not been greatly developed, and the level of discipline awareness and technology has hovered at a lower level. New criticism and structuralism have just taken root and are now a thing of the past; textual theory has attracted attention until recent years. For this reason, in the three elements of literature, literary theory and literary history are ultimately difficult to reach a deep position because of the weakness of literary criticism.

In recent years, it seems that the language study of literature has begun to attract people's attention again, which is actually the hand of literary research. Literature is also a language text in terms of its form, and the study of literature from the perspective of language should always be the true color. I remember that when mei Zulin and Gao Yougong published the Chinese translation of "The Charm of Tang Poems" in the late 1980s, the domestic academic circles were deeply touched, and linguistic criticism was widely noticed by scholars. Mr. Zhao Changping has published a long article entitled "Yixing, Imagery, And Pulse- On the Gains and Losses of Modern Linguistic Criticism in the Study of Tang Poetry", which has made a profound reflection on the gains and losses of modern linguistic criticism around the content of the book. He proposed that "the Tang people absorbed the advantages of the poetic theory of the Six Dynasties and further developed the ideas on yixing, yimei, and imagery", thus forming a unique theoretical system, and argued that "the reason why the linguistic form criticism of classical Chinese poetry cannot be compared with formalism is precisely because the concept of the Trinity has always occupied an important position" (Zhao Changping Anthology, Zhonghua Bookstore, 2021, p. 185). In his view, "the meaning of the pulse is the key to the transformation of the image into the image", and today's researchers often talk about the image and ignore the importance of the meaning. Charm "also ignores the meaning of the meaning, and thus proposes a structure for how Tang poetry works become a whole that is inconsistent with reality" (p. 201). In my impression, this is the beginning of the dialogue between the classical literature circles of the mainland and overseas sinology from the academic level with an equal posture and from the academic level since the reform and opening up, and it is also one of the extensibility views that Mr. Zhao Changping has been thinking about the relationship between Chinese poetics and essayology.

Limited by academic strength, I could not thoroughly understand his whole idea at that time, but his analysis of yixing, meaning, and imagery allowed me to see a layer of estrangement between the linguistic criticism of "Charm" and the art of Tang poetry. That's where my confusion lies. How to grasp the development of poetry art from the language level has become a problem that I will be very concerned about in the future. To this end, I have specially read a number of works on the study of poetic linguistic forms, from Liu Dabai's "Detailed Explanation of the Morphological Laws of Chinese Poetry", Wen Yiduo's "Study of the Bottom of the Laws of Poetry", Tang Yu's "Analysis of Chinese Literary Styles", Wang Li's "Chinese Poetics", Jiang Shaoyu's "Research on the Language of Tang Poetry", and so on. They drew my attention to the sound and imagery of poetry, and as for grammar, I thought that Wang Li's Chinese Poetics had no meaning left. But unexpectedly, twenty years later, Professor Cai Zongqi's book "Grammar and Poetry: A Breakdown of the Art of Chinese Poetry" once again opened the channel for me to enter the history of Chinese poetry from grammar. Professor Cai is a student of Professor Gao Yougong, one of the authors of "Charm", and this new work inherits and develops the academic ideas of the teacher, and also brings me back to the context of the linguistic criticism of Tang poetry twenty years ago.

I have known Professor Cai Zongqi for twenty years, and I have always paid close attention to his poetic research. Reading his treatises, I can always feel strongly the academic ambition of striving to re-examine Chinese literature in the context of Western knowledge, and then communicate the theory and research of Chinese and Western literature. Compared with his previous works, this new book has a different purpose, from being aimed at English readers to Chinese readers. After years of studying Classical Chinese literature and transmitting a lot of Chinese poetics knowledge to the English academic community, he obviously also hopes to publish his most important research results in his native language and directly carry out dialogue with the domestic academic community. Indeed, the title of "Grammar and Poetic Realm: An Analysis of the Art of Chinese Poetry" has revealed the author's research path, that is, to analyze the composition of the classical poetry realm from the perspective of grammar, thus revealing the artistic mystery of classical poetry.

The author begins by explaining the meaning of "grammar" and "poetic context":

Grammar, here refers specifically to the method of using poetic language, mainly covering the three aspects of rhyme, syntax and structure; poetic realm, refers to the aesthetic experience produced by the interaction and combination of these three, of which the best is considered to be able to present the reality of the subjective and objective worlds, often called "artistic conception" or "realm". (page 1)

On the fifth page of the book, he also uses charts to more intuitively show the content of poetic grammar: prosody contains three parts: rhythm, rhyme, and tone; syntax contains two parts: word order relationship (traditional syntax) and space-time-logic relationship (modern syntax), which are divided into two categories: main predicate sentences and title sentences; structure contains two parts: chapter structure and psalmic structure. He summarized his work into three points: "First, with reference to traditional poetic syntactic theory, combined with quantitative statistics, to describe the rhythm of various poetic styles more precisely. The second is to draw on the theory of modern linguistic syntax, carefully analyze the various sentence forms spawned by the rhythm of different poetic styles, and explore the generation methods of various poetic contexts in the deep relationship between time and space, reader and author. The third is to use the results of rhythm, sentence pattern, and structural analysis to explain the ancients' intuitive description of various poetic realms, in order to move from the perceptual 'knowing what it is' to the rational 'knowing why it is'. (p. 8)

The linguistic research of classical poetry by previous scholars, represented by Wang Li's "Chinese Poetics" and Jiang Shaoyu's "Study of tang poetry language", is basically based on the traditional linguistic position, using poetic texts as materials for language research, and studying the linguistic phenomena in poetry purely from the perspective of grammar and rhyme. In recent years, the research on poetic language in the academic circles has mostly focused on the changes in the number of words, sentence reading and word order of poetry lines, although it can reveal the characteristics of the use of poetic language, but it is far related to the structure of poetry; while the study of poetry is more concerned with the meaning of words and the image outside the image, and cannot implement the analysis of the text form, and finally forms a situation in which the virtual and the real are separated and the two are not connected in poetry research.

To this end, Professor Cai Zongqi first proposed that it is necessary for the study of classical poetry to deeply explore the logical relationship between language form and poetic structure, and establish a corresponding analysis mode to achieve the integration of the reality of language form and the virtual structure of poetry. On the basis of rethinking the Western scholars' view of Chinese, he established a research model of classical poetic art based on the ideographic characteristics and prosody characteristics of Chinese sounds, starting from grammar and analyzing classical poetry art at four levels: rhythm, syntax, structure and artistic conception.

Rhythm originally belongs to the scope of prosody, in view of the fact that the use of rhyme and tone grammar has been studied a lot, more importantly, the author found that the relationship between rhythm and meaning is closer than sound, and it is inseparable from the formation of syntax, so he chose rhythm as the starting point of discussion. At the syntactic level, he believes that the unique rhythm of each poem determines the main word order of the poetry group and the possibility of change- from the concept of modern grammar, that is, what kind of subject-predicate sentence form can be carried, what kind of subjective and objective phenomena can be presented in the framework of space-time logic; at the same time, what kind of title sentence can be carried, beyond the logical relationship of time and space to juxtaposed imagery and speech, so as to stimulate the reader's imagination activity. From syntactic deduction to chapter and chapter law, he found that all three follow the same organizational principles:

The main predicate follows the principle of linear organization of space-time and causal connection, and this principle is applied to the level of chapters and psalms, resulting in a coherent linear chapter and psalm. Similarly, the commentaries follow the organizing principle of space-time and causal fractures, which are applied to the level of chapters and psalms to construct a variety of fractured chapters and psalms. (80 pages)

Compared with the subject-predicate sentence form, Professor Cai pays more attention to the role of the topic comment sentence, that is, the "topic + comment" (topic + comment). The concept of the question sentence was proposed by Mr. Zhao Yuanren, who believes that the formal subject of such sentences is actually the subject of concern to the speaker or writer, while the formal predicate in the sentence is the comments made by the speaker or writer on the subject, and the concept of the question sentence incisively reveals the essence of this unique Chinese sentence pattern. However, Mr. Zhao is not in favor of establishing another equivalent "question comment sentence type" in addition to the subject predicate sentence pattern, and understands the "topic comment" as a common feature of the Chinese subject predicate sentence. Professor Cai Zongqi believes that these two sentence patterns are not only fundamentally different, but also, as Mr. Zhao pointed out, their respective proportions in Chinese are also very close, and it is logical to regard them as two types of sentence patterns that are relatively independent and complementary.

Mr. Zhao once cited Li Bai's "Clouds want to dress and flowers to think of Rong" and Du Xunhe's "Qin LinqiuShui plays the bright moon, and wine near the Eastern Mountains drinks white clouds" as examples, and particularly affirmed that the title comments are frequent sentence patterns in poetry. Professor Cai Zongqi further pointed out that the reason why title comments appear in a large number of poems is mainly because they provide poets with a lyrical way without resorting to conceptual language. In the verses, the theme is the object, scene or thing that the poet observes in the real or imaginary world, and the commentary is the sound, imagery and words that can best convey the emotional activities of the time, as collected by "the poet feels the object, the connection is infinite", so the title comment sentence is also in Chinese "can give more imagination space, more able to reflect the ideal of Imagist art sentence pattern" (p. 51). His analysis of the sentence patterns of the Book of Poetry has shown that a large number of Bixing structures in the "National Style" are written first and then lyrically, and the scenery language is mostly a caption sentence that uses continuous words; while the love language expresses its feelings more than the main predicate sentence. On the contrary, the "Daya", which is mainly based on the outspoken "Fu" pen, uses almost all predicate sentences, and only uses a few captions when the poet stops the narrative (p. 66). The influence of the two sentence patterns on the composition of the poem is obviously different: the subject verb sentence representing the linear structure has a clear narrative and complete concept, and has the characteristics of "light" and "real"; while the title sentences that cause the fractured structure prominently present the characteristics of "hidden" and "virtual", vaguely vague, leaving more room for imagination (p. 109). Sentence analysis thus reaches the ideographic level and communicates with the structure of the poem, thus connecting the various links from rhythm to poetry.

Cai's analysis mode of hierarchy of rhythm, syntax, structure, and poetic context is not limited to unfolding within the framework of synchronicity, but also in a diachronic sequence, ultimately achieving the goal of "going beyond the scope of the study of Tang poetry language" (p. 9). In fact, in addition to the introduction and summary of the first and last two chapters of the book, the middle ten chapters cover all the poetic genres except the Seven Ancients between the Book of Poetry and the Song Ci, and the grammatical forms dealt with include four words to long and short sentences of miscellaneous words, which highlights the clear context of the development of the genre characteristics and formal elements of classical poetry. This study has brought us a series of new understandings, which include at least the following aspects.

First of all, the most important theoretical achievement of Cai's book is, I think, to elucidate the variation of the rhythm and meaning generation mode of classical poetry with the lengthening of sentences and the complexity of grammar, and its related principles. For example, the relationship between sentence structure and rhythm, four words are mainly 2 + 2, five words are mainly 2 + 3, and seven words are mainly 4 + 3, which is well-known common sense. However, Professor Cai Zongqi pointed out that the rhythm of the five-word sentence 2+3 is one step more than the two-tone steps of the "Book of Poetry" based on four words, and the following three words can become 1+2 or 2+1, which adapts to the linguistic trend of the proliferation of two-syllable words in the Han Dynasty, thus changing the situation that the four words of the "Book of Poetry" need to be lined with imaginary words from time to time due to the small number of two-syllable words, which greatly improves the degree of realization of the word unit. Through his meticulous analysis of the Nineteen Ancient Poems, he shows that the rhythm of the five words 2+3 has formed the characteristics of the front and the back compared with the four words, and this shift in the center of gravity of the five words is an important turning point in the history of the evolution of Chinese poetry (p. 175). When explaining the changes from the five laws to the seven laws, he used quantitative variable sentence forms and qualitative variable sentence forms to analyze the composition of two sentence forms: adding nouns or adjectives to the simple subject-predicate sentences only increases the content of the meaning of the verse without changing the meaning; adding modal verbs, time adverbs, connecting words, etc. to the complex subject-predicate sentences will completely change the meaning of the verses, which obviously represents the essence of the seven laws. From this he further argues that "if the proportion of simple subject predicate sentences used in the Five Laws is generally greater than that of complex subject predicates, then the Seven Laws not only completely and completely reverse this ratio, but it is not uncommon for poems that use complex subject predicates throughout" (p. 637). This is a valuable reminder for us to recognize and grasp the syntactic characteristics of the five and seven laws, and the evolution between the two, and I am personally very inspired.

Another important contribution of Cai Shu is to explore the way of poetic structure in different eras through the study of poetry syntax and structure, thus bringing us a new understanding of poetry history. For example, the poetry of the Wei Jin Dynasty and the Southern Dynasty reveals the aesthetic basis for the formation of its "round beauty circulation" poetic scene in the author's exploration of syntax and structure. Professor Cai Zongqi not only captures the beauty of virtual reality created by Xie Lingyun's upside-down syntax from the use of dual sentences, the artistic effect of empathy created by Xie Shuo's duality through scene interaction, but also analyzes the structural innovation and poetic creation of different ways from Cao Zhi's triple structure, the superposition structure of Ruan Zhi and Tao Yuanming, the quadruple structure of Xie Lingyun and xie Shuo's linear structure, which greatly enriches our understanding of the artistic innovation of medieval poetry, especially the pioneering work of poetry. When discussing the syntax of the Five Laws of the Tang Dynasty, he keenly noticed that the simple subject-predicate sentence followed the Six Dynasties poem to put the verb after the second word, and then followed the new change of Shen Yue and Xie Shuo to continue to place the verb in the second and fifth words, coupled with the change of the verb position in the complex subject-predicate sentence, and the effect of turning the real into a virtual one brought about by the large use of the title sentence, revealing a rather important and imperceptible change of the Five Laws of the Tang Dynasty from the grammatical level. This obviously has important enlightening significance for the study of Tang poetry.

In the study of the syntax of lingzi, Professor Cai Zongqi further invented from the perspective of function on the conclusion that the form of the battle between the predecessors of lingzi is different from that of near-body poetry:

In the poetic pair of words, the verbs of the upper and lower sentences often appear in the same position in the sentence, forming a neat duality, thus refining the expression or shape. However, Xiao Ling rarely has such a duality. The two pairs of sentences in the near-body poem, together, bring about a sense of closure; while the pairs in the word style, whether fan-facing or tail-saving, bring about the opposite sense of forward development. (524 pages)

Coupled with the avoidance of dual sentences and the simplification of syntax—avoiding semantic differences in singular syntax like in near-body poetry—he clarifies the important syntactic transformation of near-body poetry from the perspective of "breaking". Then, from the perspective of "standing", he added the four new creations of the four lexical syntax of the lack of verb sentences, prose long sentences, collar words and inscription sentences, so that the similarities and differences between poetry and lexical syntax and the change of lexical syntax were clearly explained. Among them, his analysis of the title comment sentences is particularly pertinent, and he analyzes the diverse relationships between the subject word and the theme in the tone of different structures, which may not be without inspiration for lexical research.

Professor Cai Zongqi's diachronic investigation of poetic grammar has repeatedly highlighted the development of poetic syntax and the emergence of new sentence patterns, changing some of the inherent conclusions of historical critics. This is another commendable academic contribution of Grammar and Poetry. Regarding the artistic tendency of Dali poetry, the humble "Study of Dali Poets" criticizes the blurring of Qian Qi's poetic imagery, which is a conclusion drawn from taking meaning and using words. Cai Shu discussed the creation and change of the Tang Dynasty's Five Laws syntax, pointing out that "the common way to turn reality into fiction is to place the adverb of time and space of the three words at the end of the sentence, making it a three-word partial noun used as an object" (page 303), citing the famous sentence "After the bamboo pity the new rain, the mountain loves the sunset" as an example, and believes that the formal style of this sentence is "pity the bamboo after the new rain, love the mountain when the sunset" or "pity the bamboo after the new rain, love the mountain when the sunset", and the reverse decoration causes the effect of turning the real into a virtual. This is also the charm of the title sentence - bamboo and mountains become themes: bamboo, (I) like the bamboo after the new rain (bamboo); mountains, (I) like the sunset (the mountain). At the same time that the sentence form is changed from a declarative sentence to a topical comment sentence, poetry also achieves the effect of turning reality into fiction. Professor Cai noticed the novelty of the syntax of the Dali poetry, and associated it with the syntactic innovations pointed out by Zhao Yi's "Oubei Poetry" that Du Fu's "green wind folds bamboo shoots, red rain and fat plums" and "bizhi lake grass, clear sea and east clouds", which provides another understanding of the dali poetry, prompting me to re-examine the traces of the generosity of the dali poetry at the linguistic level, which is one of the many gains I personally gained from reading Cai's works.

Finally, although it is the proper meaning of the title, I would like to mention that the whole book of Grammar and Poetry has read new meanings in the details of many classic works, which gives us a new understanding of these familiar works, including masterpieces such as Du Fu's "Ascending to the Heights". This seven laws were promised by Hu Yinglin as "thin and difficult to name, deep and unpredictable", "brilliant and powerful" ("Shi Xue" in volume V), the historical interpretation and appraisal mostly focused on the tight syntax, dense semantics, and the frustration of the sound, etc. Cai Zhudu pointed out that it uses the title evaluation structure throughout the text, both the implicit title evaluation method in the first link, the explicit title commentary sentence of the first, the jaw, and the neck link, and the implicit title commentary of the tail link, which are varied and endless. In the author's view, "this majestic, melancholy beauty can probably only be created in the Seven Laws by relying on interlocking commentaries" (p. 375), such as the simple main predicate sentence of Wang Wei's "Jiyu Yuanchuan Zhuangzuo" in the Seven Laws, and the complex subject sentence of Du Fu's "WenguanJun Collecting Henan and Hebei". He not only detailed the different effects produced by the eight complex commentaries on "Ascending to the Heights", but also used a linear structure to analyze the smooth effect of Du Fu's "Wenguanjun Collecting Henan and Hebei", used the fracture results to explain the ambiguity and ambiguity of the theme of Li Shangyin's "Jinse", pointed out that it used a large number of imaginary characters to carry out the question of virtual causality when analyzing the "Sui Palace", and explained that it used all real words at three times in the "Yonghuai Monuments", and integrated the main predicate sentence and the title comment sentence by using the canonization of the real into a virtual. Interweaving allusions and imagery into an extremely intricate virtual space-time (pp. 401-402). All these discussions reflect the uniqueness of modern linguistic criticism in text analysis, and of course, show Professor Cai Zongqi's deep accumulation of years of immersion in the study of Chinese and Western poetics.

Speaking from the heart, this nearly seven-hundred-page work, which embodies the author's painstaking efforts for many years, is not very easy to read, and some chapters are quite complicated and even trivial in the form of evidence and analysis, but this is by no means unnecessary, and solid research requires meticulous analysis. In order to let readers clearly understand their academic ideas and the context of the whole book, Professor Cai Zongqi designed a very approachable writing method for this work. After completing the specific exposition in the middle ten chapters, the twelfth chapter summarizes its conclusions along the progress of rhythm, syntax, structure, and poetry, not only connecting the specific conclusions and erecting the grand structure of the whole book, but also condensing the ideological crystallizations derived from the meticulous combing of the middle chapters into rigorous and solid theoretical fruits.

From the end of last year to April this year, in addition to busy teaching, I intermittently read Professor Cai's masterpiece, which really benefited a lot. While deeply inspired, I also wrote down some details that I felt were available for consideration. It is mainly a different view of the semantic legality of certain verses, and actually involves the understanding of the text. For example, regarding the judgment of the inscription and commentary in the Book of Poetry, is "Guan Guan Ju Dove" and "Lady Of The Lady" a comment + an inscription (page 105), or is it a phrase that merges with "In the River Continent" and "Gentleman Is Good" into a declarative sentence? This involves the question of how to understand sentence integrity. Sometimes the four words cannot constitute a complete sentence, and the division of the unit of meaning may be different from that of future generations. For example, the division of rhythm sometimes involves the division of paragraphs of poetic meaning. For example, "The Ignorance of Lezi" in "Shu YouChangchu" and "Fearful of People" (p. 160) can be regarded as the rhythm of the upper two and the lower three? I think that in the case of four words as stereotypes and five words as accidental exceptions, these two sentences seem to be understood as the rhythm of three and two down, that is, music (of) / ignorance, fear of people (of) / more words. After all, the next three words cannot be analyzed into a rhythm of 1+2 or 2+1, and cannot be developed into a rhythm of five words. I also have a different understanding of some Tang poetry judgments. For example, in Chang Jian's "Title Breaking the Mountain Temple's Back Zen Courtyard", "Mountain Light Delights Bird Nature, Tan Ying Empty Heart", Cai Zhu believes that the formal dress style should be "Mountain Light [Middle] Bird Sex Delight, Tan Ying [Front] People's Heart Empty", where "the inverted technique is used to realize the transformation of reality into fiction, so that mountain light and Pond Shadow become sentient things" (p. 299). However, according to the traditional reading, the two sentences can also be understood as the use of verbs, that is, the mountain light makes the bird happy, and the pond shadow makes the heart empty. This is exactly the usual way of expression in Tang poetry to interact with things and me through skeuomorphism and anthropomorphism, if the mountain light and lake shadow are used as environmental languages, the joy of bird nature and the emptiness of people's hearts become their own state, but instead isolate the blending and interactive relationship between things and things and things. Another similar example is Meng Haoran's "Steaming Cloud Mengze, Waves Shake Yueyang City", Cai Shu interprets it as "Yun Mengze [Li] Vapor, Yueyang City [Side] Wave Shake" (p. 303), the popular explanation is generally that the water vapor of Dongting Lake is vast and steaming onto Yun Mengze, and the waves of Dongting Lake surge to shake Yueyang City, which is a normal subject-called guest sentence. There is also Jia Dao's "suddenly go from the city with the piano, Xu to the mountains to send medicine", whether the next sentence is the format of the upper six or the format of the previous six, which also involves the difference in understanding. Since it is a difference in understanding, it is very simple and difficult to assert right and wrong, and it is written here for the consideration of the author and the general reader.

The biggest feature of the book "Grammar and Poetry" is also the place that surpasses the previous generations of scholars, that is, to connect rhythm, syntax, structure and poetic context, and strive to reveal problems with academic significance in the discussion of the basic level, showing people's pursuit of the upward journey. With regard to the change from four to five words, the author raises questions related to the trend of the substantialization of vocabulary due to the large increase in two-syllable words in the Han Dynasty, which is obviously a very insightful hypothesis. I once heard researcher Zhang Bojiang mention in his speech at the conference that the shortness of ancient sentences may be related to the length of the time value of the word. So is the increase in the rhythm of the verse also related to the shortening of the sound of the words? In any case, these insights provide new ideas for us to re-understand the changes in the four to five words. Due to space limitations, this article cannot enumerate the theoretical problems raised by Grammar and Poetry with the author's new insights, and I believe that readers will have their own gains and trigger more in-depth thinking.

A good academic work will not only tell us some new knowledge, it will certainly touch our minds, stimulate our imagination, and make our harvest beyond the content of the book. I read Grammar and Poetry, and that's exactly what I experienced.