The Predicate-object Structures In Shi Shuo Xin Yu

Shi Shuo Xin Yu is a Chinese traditional famous fiction work consisting mainly of short sketches about the aristocrats in that time, whose editor in chief is Yiqing Liu, the Lin Chuan Prince of the Southern Dynasties Song. This book had a lot of spoken language so that it could reflect the language development of its age. Thus the study of this book has great value to the research of Chinese language development from ancient times through to the mediaeval age. This paper, with Shi Shuo Xin Yu being the special language material, completely counts up the predicate-object structures of this work and then makes overall description to all classes of predicate-object structures and analyzes their characteristics and differences. Compared with ancient Chinese, the predicate-object structures in Shi Shuo Xin Yu take on many new transitional features of the mediaeval age Chinese, such as the presence of a great number of the Opl, the expand of the bi-object sentence patterns. Moreover, the Oa also has appeared, and the phenomenon that the Se transfers to be the Oe is very common. Furthermore, the Oa is emerging. The procedure of the description of the predicate-object structures has two steps: First, classify the predicate-object structures in Shi Shuo Xin Yu. Because the predicate-object structure is an endocentric construction and the predicate is the core of it, the predicate verbs in different classes have different powers in governing objects. Therefore, the classification of the predicate-object structures bases on that of the verbs. According to the semantic distinctions of themes, the verbs fall into 5 classes, namely the behavioral verb, the state verb, the rendering verb, the perceptive verb and the linking verb. Second, review the distinctions of the 5 classes of verbs in governing objects. The 5 classes of verbs can govern 9 classes of objects, namely the Oa, the O_p, the O_d, the O_pl, the O_f, the O_pe, the O_e, the O_c and the O_t. Each class object can be described from two aspects: the constitutions of it and the possibility of it in transferring to other syntactic components(the subject, the adverbial and the complement, especially the subject). The review of all kinds of the bi-object sentence patterns is one of the emphases of this paper. In Shi Shuo Xin Yu, there are 3 classes of verbs can go into the bi-object sentence patterns, which are V_t,V_vC2 and V_rB2. V_t can make up of 3 kinds of the bi-object sentence patterns, namely S_a+P(V_t)+O_p+O_d, S_a+P(V-t)+O_d+O_p and S_a+P(V_t)+O_p+O_pl.V_vc2 can also make up of the bi-object sentence pattern, which is 'Sr+VvC2+Od+Ope'. V_rB2 can make up of the pseudo-bi-object sentence pattern, namely'(V_rB2+O_fB2)+O_pl'. Besides, this paper also adopts the grammaticalization theory and reanalysis theory to analyze the grammaticalizational processes of 'bei₁'and 'zhu₄'. This paper consider that the grammaticalization of 'bei₁'began at 200AD,and that'zhu4'has no relation with progressive termination 'zhe'.