On The Diversity And Complexity Of Syntactic Function Of The Nouns, Verbs And Adjectives In Pre-Qin Chinese Through The Study Of Lexical Usage In Analectds And The Art Of War By SunBin

This thesis is an attempt to research into the development of the usage of content words in Pre-Qin Chinese on the basis of the lexical study of two of classics in this period-Anlects and The Art of War by Sun Bin.The present thesis, by comparing and contrasting between lexical usage of Pre-Qin Chinese and that in the language system derived from inscriptions on bones or tortoise shells in Shang Dynasty, outlines the major change in syntactic functions of nouns, verbs and adjectives in Pre-Qin Chinese and indicates that the diversity and complexity of syntactic functions of the three major content words in this period promoted the development of the flexible usage of words and multi-function of words, which contributed to the formation of ancient Chinese as a varied and complicated language system.The thesis consists of two parts:Part One reports the characteristics of diversified syntactic functions of nouns, verbs and adjectives in Pre-Qin Chinese, which are interpreted in four sections.Section One: On the Diversity of Syntactic Funtions of Nouns.This section points out that in this period, nouns, still used as subjects, objects, attributes as in remote antiquity, came to function as predicates to constitate declarative sentence. The section also indicates that general nouns in some cases can be temporarily used as adverbials, representing multi-folded grammatical meaning.Section Two: On the Diversity of Syntactic Functions of Verbs.The section reports that many verbs, generally used only as predicates in the inscriptions system, worked as attributes as well as subjects, objects and adverbials additionally.Section Three: On the Diversity of Syntactic Functions of Adjectives. Adjectives, in Zhou Dynasty, developed as adberbials and predicates besidessubjections and objects while generally as attributes, adverbials and predicates in inscriptions system.Section Four: On the Relationship between Diversity of syntactic Functions of Words and Grammatical Functional Perspective of Parts of Speech.The section points out that "advantage correspondence", in terms of content words as syntactic components, leads to the "general and specitic" relationship between a word's syntactic funcyion which determines its part of speech and its temporary syntactic function.Part Two: Through the analysis of the characteristics of the diversity of syntactic functions of nouns, verbs and adjectives in Pre-Qin period. The thesis indicates that the flexible usage of words and multi-function of words developed in an interactive and complex way. The part falls into two sections.Section One: On the the flexible usage of the Three Major Content Words.This section indicates that the imperative use of a word and the usage of conation of nouns and adjectives were generally used and it became common that nouns and adjectives functioned as general verbs and verbs and verbs and adjectives as nouns.Section Two: discusses two problems. (D. How to distinguish the flexible usage of words and multi-function of words. The thesis proposes that morphological analysis be taken into account and emphasis be laid on original meaning and extended meaning, not only the frequency of use of words be analyzed. (2). The present thesis points out that cause and effect relationship does exist between the two. With the development of word meaning, making flexible use of words became accepted, whose temporarily used meaning gao eventually as general meaning. Thus, the flexible usage of words became one of means by which multi-function of words formed. The thesis also indicates that as presentations of the development of lexical meaning, making flexible use of words and extention in meaning grammatically and lexicaly interprete the fact that the development of lexial meaningcause the multi-function of words.