A Study On Hunting Verbs Of The Shang Dynasty-the Western Zhou Dynasty

Hunting is one of the important methods for our ancestors to obtain the means of production and livelihood,not only the birds and beasts but also the fishes are captured.Hunting verbs as a kind of verbs which indicate the meaning of capture,it is necessary to make a dynastic research for hunting verbs.From a historical point of view,The study of hunting verbs in the Shang Dynasty and the Western Zhou Dynasty contributes to knowing the location,organization,tools and means of field hunting activities carried out by the Shang Dynasty and the Western Zhou Dynasty royal families,also seeing the species and natural geography during the Shang Dynasty and the Western Zhou Dynasty.Besides,from the perspective of the history of Chinese language,it is a great value to explore the use and evolution of meaning,usage and construction of the hunting words in the study of Chinese common words.Therefore,we take hunting verbs of the Shang Dynasty to the Western Zhou Dynasty as the object of study to describe and discuss the means and grammar of hunting verbs during the period of the Shang Dynasty and the Western Zhou Dynasty by relevant theories.During the period from the Shang Dynasty to the Western Zhou Dynasty,the changes of hunting verbs are obvious and the distribution is imbalanced in the use of hunting verbs at each stage.There are a total of 30 hunting verbs in the Shang Dynasty and only 25 of them can be known,to be specific,23 in the Period of WuDing,5 in the Period of ZuGeng-ZuJia,18 in the Period of LinXin-GengDin,11 in the Period of WuYi-WenDing and 6 in the Period of DiYi-DiXin.All 15 hunting verbs are found in the Western Zhou Dynasty,12 of them can be found in the literature handed down,3 can be found in the unearthed literature.8 verbs inherited from the Shang Dynasty and 7 new ones occurred in the Western Zhou Dynasty.In the Western Zhou Dynasty,there were 18 verbs which were used as hunting verbs but disappeared in the Western Zhou Dynasty.In terms of sentence patterns,there are 30 types of sentence patterns in the period of the Shang Dynasty,and 12 types of sentence patterns in the period of the Western Zhou Dynasty,among which 10 types of sentence patterns are derived from the period of the Shang Dynasty.Compared with the period of the Shang Dynasty,the number of sentence patterns is reduced by a half in the period of the Western ZhouDynasty.The structure of sentence patterns are mostly common sentence patterns and the construction is relatively simple.As far as the syntactic function is concerned,the syntactic function of the hunting verbs themselves have not changed from the period of the Shang Dynasty to the Western Zhou Dynasty.The joint structure of hunting verbs and other verbs can be divided into simple structure and complex structure.In the period of the Shang Dynasty,there were many different forms of conjunction between hunting verbs and each other,and in the period of the Western Zhou Dynasty,the combination of hunting verbs and other verbs is simple.In the sentence which makes up of the hunting verbs,the subject is usually defined by the noun or family names.The category of object is relatively single which is filled with a noun.We can use temporal adverbial,square adverbial,positive adverbial,negative adverbial,modal particle and so on to embellish hunting verbs.Complements of the hunting verbs can be divided into three categories: verb phrase,preposition and number.From the perspective of the general development of the hunting verbs from the Shang Dynasty to the Western Zhou Dynasty,the number and the construction of the sentence which makes up of the hunting verbs are constantly changing,some verbs are replaced,others are eliminated in the process of usage,and the common verbs are fixed.