“Han Feizi” Serial-verb Construction Research

The "Han Feizi",a book authored during the Warring States Period(475 – 221 BCE),is a very important book in Legalist Philosophy; it is rich in content,and it reflects the spoken Chinese language style of the time. Using Chen Qiyou’s "Han Feizi xin jiao zhu" an annotated version of the "Han Feizi" I was able to create a complete collection of all serial-verb constructions and analyze them using the Three Planes Theory to exa mine its syntactic,semantic and pragmatic context.There are five parts in the paper. The introduction is the first part,it gives the reason for this study, previous scholar’s studies on the subject—both on the "Han Feizi" and the research method in this paper on serial-verb constructions—and the method used to analyze this information. The second,third,and fourth part is the central content of this research,using the "three planes" theory,all serial-verb constructions in the “Han Feizi” are analyzed from syntactic,semantic and pragmatic perspective.The second part analyzes the research on all the serial-verb construction. The serial-verb construction structures can be categorized between those with no conjunction, and those with conjunctions like “而”and“以” which account for 46.8% and 12.4% of all serial-verb constructions respectively. They are also separated multiple serial-verb constructions,and single serial-verb construction structures which is primarily dominated by the latter.The third part is a semantic analysis.The analysis finds that the“Han Feizi"single serial-verb construction are constructed,from most common to least as:action verb+action verb,state verb+action verb,action verb+state verb,and state verb+state verb.The semantic analysis shows that the verbs in the serial-verb constructions have顺承(order by time),purpose,cause and effect,turning,progressive and other smaller relationships between individual-action verbs.This section also analyzed the semantic orientation.The fourth part is a pragmatic analysis. In this section we examine the "Han Feizi”s serial-verb construction themes and the subjects, analyzing the focus of each structure. Through the research,it was found that “active-sentences” accounted for a significant percentage versus passive sentence structures; and in most serial-verb constructions the focus generally falls on the last of a verb.The fifth part is the conclusion of the paper. It overviews the important content and focus of this research,it also details the areas in which this research lacks.