Guan Hanqing's Verb Valency Grammar,

Traditional scholium is a subject that analyzes the meaning of Chinese characters (words) according to their patterns and pronunciations with the method of obtaining the meaning through pattern as well as pronunciation. Scholium dates back to ancient time when ER Ya was coompiled. Er Ya created the term "yi xun" which means onomastic scholium. Liu Xi's Shi Ming explored language origin from the perspective of pronunciation.The pioneer scholiasts Duan and Wang in Qing dynasty also touched upon onomastic scholium. From a historic view, with Er Ya , Shi Ming , Duan and Wang's works in our minds , we can make a conclusion that traditional scholium expounded the literal meaning (sense of a word) from the internal features of characters. Along with the introduction of western language theories, Chinese linguists have always been attempting to integrate suitable methods and experience of western linguistic theories into Chinese language research. Valence grammatical theory was just the result of this attempt. The research on Chinese language facts by means of valence grammatical theory was firstly seen in Zhu Dexi' s Structure of "De "and Sentences of Judgment written in 1978. Later on, the theory was primarily drew upon to analyze the meaning of verbs, nouns and adjectives. Analyses of verbs were further acknowledgement of verbs' semantic features through the description of verbs' valence ability, namely, the amount of nouns with which verbs could be used together. At present, semantic researching approach to Chinese language based on this theory has gradually matured, which makes it possible to use this theory to study ancient Chinese language materials.This thesis chooses Guan Hanqing's dramas that are close to modern Chinese language as language materials. Two considerations draw me to make this choice one of which is that the drama of Yuan Dynasty was a newly born art at that time, and its audience were the grassroots. That's why its talking and singing were close to spoken language at that time. Another consideration is that Guan Hanqing's 18 dramas completely reserved and another 3 that are incomplete can form a language material system that is comparatively abundant, close-end and contains a great deal of verbs with high reappearance frequency and rich valence categories. As a result, the valence analysis approach is practicable in analyzing verbs in these dramas. The thesis can be divided into four episodes: The first part is the preface which expounds the selecting process, characteristic and significance of research as far as the materials in this thesis are concerned. The second part is the main body of this thesis. It consists of four chapters. Chapter I covers three aspects. The first one is theoretical interpretation that primarily elaborates the theory on which the thesis is based, the second one is Modern Chinese valence grammatical theory and the basis and methods of practical analysis and use, and the third one is problems caused by using valence grammatical theory to research ancient Chinese language materials and the solutions to these problems. Chapter II: After a thorough analysis of the verbs in Guan Hanqing's dramas, I divide verbs into four categories, namely, verbs of action, verbs of relation, verbs of state and modal verbs. The thesis respectively analyzes the grammatical forms and semantic characteristics of verbs in each category. Chapter III compares and analyzes different characteristics of verbs on the basis of respectively interpreting each category. The comparison and analysis lead us to the delimitation of grammatical patterns and the semantic models of verbs that appear in Guan Hanqing's dramas. The third part is supplementary comment. It primarily elaborates that the thesis is a system which reflects semantic system of verbs in each times through making complete valence analysis of ancient Chinese language materials. The fourth part is the appendix mainly composed of attached graphs.