Research On The Single-syllable Predicate Verbs In Xinxu By Valence Theory

From the 1970 s introduced to China, the valence theory has been applied to Chinese for more than 40 years and the academia has solved some problems on Chinese grammar by using it. Valence grammar can directly reflect the relationship between the syntactic and the semantic so that it is an effective approch of researching grammar structure and the relationship between the semantic and the syntactic. In recent years, Chinese scholars begin to apply the valence theory to ancient Chinese. And this article is another try.Based on the corpus of Xin Xu, according to the semantic features of verbs,this article classifies the single-syllable predicate verbs into five categories, namely action verbs, properties verbs, relationship verbs, psychological verbs and causative verbs and classifies the semantic roles of subordinate elements of the verbs into 3 major categories and 24 small categories. It takes the smallest self-contained subject-predicate structure composed of the predicate verb and its obligatory semanteme as the basic framework and makes an overall and systematical reveal of the valence ability of verbs and their semantic relationships with the subordinative elements by integrating the basic framwork with some other semanteme, the basic sentence patterns and the derived patterns.This article confirms that the grammatical characters of Valence is either semantics or syntax, and the valence ability of verbs should be decided both by semantics and syntax. Valence is not a single concept but a hierarchy, so we introduce “valence levels”, which is composed of valence, link and item. By analysis, this paper divides the verbs into four kinds: monvalent verbs, bivalent verbs, trivanlent verbs and quasi verbs, and eventually forms a table that embodies the valence situation of all single-syllable predicate verbs in Xinxu.