"wuyuechunqiu" Verbs

The History of Wu and Yue is regarded as the first historical novel. Its language is colorful (Ji Yun, a scholar in Qing Dynasty) and embodies, in a sense, the linguistic features of the times during which It appears. By means of all the verbs collected from the book and from different viewpoints .this dissertation studies the characteristics and rules of the development of the verbs in Dong I-tan Dynasty, the transitional period from ancient Chinese to the middle ancient Chinese. In The History of Wu and YUe there are 891 verbs. As for their syllables, the majority are monosyllabic verbs and polysyllabic ones make up 25 percent which has rised up when compared with that of the prein days. On the other hand, according to their references, all of the verbs can be dMded into 15 categories and each of them is analyzed by giving many examples. By describing the polysyilabies with respect to morpheme collocations and semantic meanings, the author concludes that the verb compounds are more complicated than those of the preceding periods. The characteristic of morpheme collocotions is that, almost without exception. most of the verb compounds contain at least one element of verb morphemes. The semantic relations of verb compounds indicate that the relations between morphemes of the verbbject words are the most complicated; then of the coordinate and subordinate verbs; thirdly of verb omplement words; and the least, of the subject redicate verbs. Besides, the syntactic functions of the verbs are more diverse in that more and more verbs can act as adverbial modifiers, attributes and objects. Likewise, In the light of the sememes of the verbs in the book. monosemontic verbs consist of more than fifty percent in all the monosyllabic ones and also over half of the monosemantic verbs are employed in their original meanings, which shows that this kind of words in The H/story of Wu and Yue conserves the meaning which are inherited from the preceding generations. In addition, the verbal synonyms and antonyms in the book, compared with those in Tso Chuan, are richer and more frequently used and still the rate of the two kinds of words is higher than that in Tso Chuan. Meanwhile, a number of synonymous verb compounds emerge but the structure of some of them and the orders of their constituents have not yet fixed. Whereas, verbal antonyms are tanglesome because of one word with many different antonyms. Finally, based on the fact that some of the materials of The History of Wu and Yue are adapted from the historical records, such as Tso Qhuan. &uo Yu and .Shi Ji . the author concludes, by comparison of the corresponding parts between the former and the latter three books; that the result of the process of combining two free verb morphemes is almost coordinate verb compounds: that the structures of the verbal predicates become more and more complicated; and that the phenomenon has increased that verbs combined directly with the words used for location, subject or purpose. In summary, the characteristics of the verbs in The History of Wu and Yue reflect, to some extent, the features of the verbs in Dong Han Dynasty and the rules of their development.