Abstract:

The popular “ancient vernacular” thinking during the May 4^th Literary Revolution absolutized and universalized the phenomenon of “the unity of spoken and written languages” in the developmental history of Chinese language mentioned by ZHANG Tai-yan, resulting in forcibly transforming some classical Chinese works into “ancient vernacular”, which deviates from ZHANG’s vernacular thinking based on philology. At the same time, the “the style of abolishing allusions”, “the view of applied literature” and “the debate strategy of deeply grasping errors in writing” in new literature learned from ZHANG’s view of “natural and unadorned writing”, but discarded the fundamentals of textual research in his doctrine. When the May 4^TH literary revolution transformed ZHANG’s view of literary Language, ZHANG also pondered over the literary revolution, emphasizing the dependence of vernacular on classical Chinese and showing the difficulty in “the unity of spoken and written languages”.

Key words: May 4^th literary revolution, ZHANG Tai-yan, the view of literary language, ancient vernacular, natural and unadorned writing, classical Chinese