On The Universal Verb "Zuo"

The kind of verbs this paper is going to discuss has various names: form verbs, virtual meaning verbs, virtualized verbs, first words, puppet words, etc., such as "搞" "作" "打". This paper follows Mr. Liu Ruiming's point of view and calls them "universal verb" which refers to the ones that don't relate or correspond to any concrete action but express universal action meaning. This paper takes "作" as an example, describing in details its syntaxical features, sentence patterns and functions it produces; also, it explores its history of development. Furthermore, by analyzing some universal verbs in English, the paper illustrates that the universal verbs are not unique in Chinese, and preliminarily studies the theoretical evidence of their origin and existence.In the first chapter, introduction part, the paper defines the object of study, overviews the previous studies and briefly introduces the study thoughts and method of this paper; in the second chapter, it minutely describes the syntaxical features of "作", and its sentences patterns and functions; in the third chapter, it explores briefly its history of development; in the forth chapter, the author discusses the theoretical evidence of the origin and existence of the universal words; by analyzing the universal verbs in English, this paper shows the universal verbs are not unique in Chinese, but indispensable to any mature language. To some extent, this kind of verbs embodies the commonness of human languages.The paper thinks universal verbs convey wide and universal meanings, but in concrete language circumstances they have concrete ones; the meanings of this kind of words are abundant; the origin of the universal verbs is really related to language economy, language illegibility and characters of oral communication; the interaction between the development and diversification of word meaning and the change of syntaxical position and combinational relationship may be the immediate and practical reason of the origin and development of universal verbs.