A Study Of The Double-syllable Verbs Of Three-valence In Heroes Of The Marshes

the present thesis will mainly apply the relatively mature valence theory in modern Chinese to analyze Heroes of the Marshes. Through a detailed study of 69 double-syllable three-valence verbs in this book, the author holds that the valence theory can be applied to the study of ancient Chinese.These 69verbs can be mainly divided into types of "giving and taking" verbs, verbs of "asking for and informing", verbs of "inquiring", of which 57 are "giving and taking" verbs, taking up 82.6%. In accordance to the meaning, this type of verbs can be divided further into ordinary giving and taking type, largess, and donating. There are 2 verbs of "asking for", taking up 2.8% of all. Verbs of inquiring are 10, which takes up 14.5% of all.Because there is no meaning morphology for Chinese in a strict sense, the author adopts a combined method of typical pragmatic structure assessment and approach of discriminating semantic entailment, and, based on detailed analysis, obtains four pragmatic sentence patterns in Heroes of the Marshes.1 NP1+V+NP2+NP32 NP1+PNP2+V+NP33 NP1+PNP3+V+NP24 NP1+V1+NP3+V2+NP2 (lian-dong sentence)By means of a comparison between modern Chinese and the ancient Chinese, the author of the present thesis holds that the latter two forms do not exist in modern Chinese. In the process of language development, the verb meaning of the former verb in pragmatic formula 4 weakens, while its prepositional meaning gets strengthened, which comes closer to pragmatic formula 3. Moreover, the preposition in pragmatic formula 3 keeps the meaning of "ba" only after long period of development, which finally leads to the sentence pattern of "ba" in modern Chinese.Of course, the present thesis analyzes only the three-valence semantic of double-syllable verbs in the Heroes of the Marshes, and this could not represent all the verbs throughout this book. However, it is due to this very limited number of double-syllable three-valence semantic verbs that a detailed analysis could be made and that some characteristics of the verbs in Heroes of the Marshes could be revealed.