Some linguistic criteria for the relative dating of the primary sources within the complex text of the «Basic Annals of the first emperor of Qin» in the Sima Qian’s «Records of the Grand Historian»

Abstract

This paper examines the division of the complex heterogeneous source text, namely the 6th chapter of the Basic Annals in the Sima Qians Records of the Grand Historian, into parts according to linguistic criteria. Also the paper analyzes the problem of distinguishing boundaries and differences between the primary sources included in the text of the examined source. We employed the identification of the grammatical characters in the text as a way of linguistic analysis based on the A.M. Karapetiants method, compiling the frequency dictionaries of grammatical characters and selecting the fixed set of the most frequent ones. Comparison of the figures obtained for the Records of the Grand Historian 6th chapter with the similar figures obtained for some epigraphic texts from Shuihudi (that is, the grammatical characters percentage within the whole text and the set of the most frequent ones) allows us to propose a hypothesis that explains the differences between the data due to the fact that authors of the texts come from different cultural fields. Thus, the results of the study allow us to distinguish the differences in the cultural fields producing the historical sources from chronological differences indicating dissimilar (or similar) times of texts creation.