Study On The Verbs In Lun Heng

A verb is the core constituent of a sentence, which every other constituent of the sentence, such as the subject, object, adverbial or the complement, is related to. This dissertation mainly studies the verbs in Lun Heng.Lun Heng is written during the East Han Dynasty. Having more than twenty-six thousand characters, Lun Heng is a valuable document for the study of medieval Classic Chinese. This dissertation studies the verbs in Lun Heng, mainly on their grammatical characteristics and the rules of collocation. It consists of two parts:Firstly, the classification of the verbs. There are 2209 verbs in Lun Heng, of which 1358 ones are monosyllabic verbs, and 851 ones are polysyllabic verbs. According to their meaning, collocation and grammatical function, the verbs are divided into seven categories: action verbs, mentally verb of action, verb of speech, auxiliary verb, verb of comparison, verb of existence and the copula. Of these seven categories of verbs, those which act as predicates are the focal points in the research. This dissertation describes the characteristics of those verbs, analyses and illustrates their usage.Besides, this dissertation also studies those verbs acting as adverbial. There are 26 verbs with that function in Lun Heng. As the semantic meanings as a verb are weakening, some of these verbs are becoming unadulterated auxiliary words.Secondly, two kinds of special syntactic constructions: passive construction, and dual-object construction. This dissertation syntactically analyses the two constructions, and induces their syntactic forms. There are six forms of passive construction, and each form has a different symbol which specifies grammatical...