Wang Li has been engaged in the study of Chinese vocabulary since the 1940s, and has published Death, Remains and the Cycle of Old Words (194 1), The Generation of New Words (1942), The Ideal Dictionary (1945) and The Book of Words. Two papers, New Exegetics (1947) and Some Problems in Exegetics (1962), have made a serious summary and criticism of China's traditional exegetics. He also advocated the establishment of new Chinese semantics from the perspective of historical development. His cognate dictionary (1982) is a representative work of carrying out his own lexicology thought.
Wang Li's descriptive and historical research on Chinese phonetics, grammar and vocabulary is concentrated in the book Historical Manuscripts of Chinese (upper, middle and lower, 1957 ~ 1958). At the end of 1970s, it was revised and rewritten into three books: History of Chinese Phonetics (1985), History of Chinese Grammar and History of Chinese Vocabulary. His Linguistic History of China (198 1) gives a comprehensive description and preliminary summary of China's linguistic research and heritage since 2000. The book Ancient Phonology in Qing Dynasty mainly introduces and comments on the research achievements of Jiang Yong, Duan Yucai, Dai Zhen, Kong Guangsen, Wang Niansun, Zhu, Jiang Youpei and modern Zhang and Huang Kan. Other owners
Ancient Chinese (1962 ~ 1964, ***4 volumes, revised by 1980) is novel in teaching system and rich in content, which has been widely praised at home and abroad.
Wang Li attaches importance to the application of language. He has done a lot of research and promotion in Chinese character reform, Chinese standardization and Putonghua promotion. As early as the 1930 s, he advocated the reform of writing and the use of romanization. The monograph "Chinese Character Reform" published by 1940 analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of current Chinese characters and the possibility of reform, and puts forward the reform plan. After 1949, he participated in the research work of Chinese character simplification, Chinese pinyin scheme formulation, Putonghua promotion and Chinese standardization, and published many papers.
Wang Li is also a poet. His Poetics of China (1958) made a thorough study of the metrical and linguistic features of China's ancient poems. The two papers published by 1962, The Beauty of Language Form in China's Classical Literary Theory and On the Beauty of Language Form, are another important achievement of his study of poetic language, which attracted wide attention in the poetic circles at that time. Wang Li is also a poet, and he is the author of "The Carving of Dragons and Insects" (1984).
Wang Li has more than 40 monographs and nearly 200 papers on linguistics, covering almost all fields of linguistics, many of which are groundbreaking. These works are being compiled into Collected Works of Wang Li, with a total of 20 volumes. The first three volumes were published in 1985. Wang Li donated the manuscript fee for this book and established the "Peking University Wang Li Linguistics Award", which was selected and awarded from 1986.