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| From Male Beauty to Female Beauty: Change of the Semantic History of the Gender Orientation of “Li” |
| YANG Ai-jiao |
| College of Humanities, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, Guangdong, 518060 |
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Abstract The word “Li”(麗) has a meaning of “beautiful”, which has been preserved to this day, but it refers to different genders in different historical periods. The pre-Qin Period advocated great beauty, and “Li” refers to both men and women, but mainly refers to men. In the Han Dynasty, the modification object of “Li” became clear, and it directly pointed to a person’s “appearance”; the words that match the word “Li” differed depending on gender. When it pointed to men, the combination of words such as “Mei”(美), “Zhuang”(壮) and “Man”(曼) highlights the elegance of men; when it refers to women, it is often combined with the words “Shu”(姝), “Miao”(妙) and “Yi”(逸) to emphasize the beauty of women. During the Wei and Jin Dynasties, both men and women regarded femininity as their beauty, so the word “Li” is unisex for both men and women. Except for a certain period in the Tang Dynasty, women were beautiful because they were fat, and in other periods, they were beautiful because they were delicate. “Li” mainly describes women. In the Song Dynasty, women were beautiful because they were humble and thin, and most of them were beautiful. In this case, “beautiful” refers to women. After the Yuan Dynasty, the standards of physical beauty of men and women were completely differentiated. Men regarded strong as beautiful, and women regarded thin as beautiful. “Li” only pointed to women, and became an exclusive adjective for women. To be analyzed from the perspective of the semantic history, the semantic scope of “Li” has undergone at least three changes: the first is the expansion of the semantic scope, and “Li” has developed from referring mostly to men in the Pre-Qin Period to a generic reference to men and women in the Han and Wei dynasties; the second change is the semantic scope has narrowed. “Li” has evolved from referring to both men and women in the Han and Wei dynasties to mostly referring to women in the Tang and Song dynasties. The third change is the narrowing of the semantic scope again. “Li” has evolved from referring mostly to women in the Tang and Song dynasties to merely referring to women in the Yuan Dynasty. Nowadays, “Li” has a clear direction and clear meaning, and has become a morpheme with extremely strong word-forming ability.
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Received: 27 July 2023
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2023, Vol. 40 
