Abstract:

Essayists of the Tang and Song dynasties consciously celebrated the rhetorical effect of function words, which made function words an important subject in traditional stylistics. During the Qing dynasty, discussions on function words had two voices. In contrast to the school of philology's linguistic approach, the school of rhetoric focused on the style of writing to illuminate the rhetorical significance of function words. In the early modern era, Chinese scholars familiarized themselves with the categorization of Western learning and made attempts to reveal the characteristics of classical prose from a holistic perspective. By looking at function words' rhetorical effect in the context of grammatical analysis, they considered function words to be not only an essential to the genre of prose but also a concrete representation of traditional stylistics.

Key words: function words, traditional stylistics, early modern stylistics, rhetoric