Abstract: The exegetic texts in pre-Qin classics are divided into two major stages:the scholarship of court officials and the scholarship of Zhuzi philosophers.The former was an act of incipient cultural interpretation in early China,which underwent a historical transformation in the context of the idea of nominal rectification,the popularization of cultural education,and the contention of a hundred schools of thoughts.In terms of academic spirit,the focus of exegetic texts in classics shifted from the denotation of words to the connotation of words and took mutual linguistic evidence as the basic verification path,thus forming the unique principles of Chinese exegetics.In terms of academic content,exegetic texts laid the foundation for the tradition of exegetics since the Han dynasties from the perspectives of style,content,type,terminology,etc.In this process,the broad sense of interpretation coalesced into the semantics-centred exegesis,indicating the genesis laws of Chinese exegetics.Based on the historical starting point of Chinese exegesis,we can deeply understand the ancient and modern times of exegesis and grasp its discipline characteristics and modern development direction.

Key words: exegetic texts in pre-Qin classics, principles of Chinese exegetics, semantics, hermeneutics