Changes in Du Fu's Poetic Diction and the Transformation of His Consciousness of Unfulfillment Before and After the An Lushan Rebellion

Abstract

The most significant finding of this paper is the marked recession of the society-other lexical group in Denggao (登高, “Ascending the Heights”), a phenomenon that, within the scope of the literature reviewed for this study, has not been addressed in previous scholarship. This discovery enables a more precise account of Du Fu's process of internalization, demonstrating that the structural shift of his consciousness of unfulfillment—from an outward-oriented posture of opposition toward an inward-oriented existential solitude—is not merely an interpretive judgment but is concretely realized at the level of poetic diction itself. By applying semantic field analysis to classical Chinese poetry, this paper opens a new avenue for empirical investigation into the linguistic dimensions of Tang poetry.