上古汉语的名物化现象再探 = The study on nominalization of archaic Chinese

Verbs and nouns are the two most basic forms of words in any language. Almost all languages in the world posses both these word classes. (Fromkin & Rodman, 1983) Both verbs and nouns can be modified to take upon new meanings. One of these ways is through nominalization. Archaic Chinese also shows the phenomenon of nominalization. However, prevailing/current literature in the study of archaic Chinese sees this practice as ci lei huo yong (the alternation use of words); verbs replace nouns and gain their syntactic properties. Zhang (2005) has also touched on the practice of using verbs as nouns. In his article “ci-dong ci lei” (verb-noun word class), he separated a list of words into verbs and nouns based on the presence of syntactic function. Words with syntactic function were classified as verbs while words without/with least syntactic function were classified as nouns. It is in my opinion that his assumption of word class being decided by syntax is board and general, as it had neglected the form and function of nominalization. As such, this paper intends to employ Aikhenvald's (2011) findings on form and nominalization to analyze nominalization in Archaic Chinese. Researchers today believe that the word morphology of archaic Chinese allowed the limited number of monosyllabic words to assume new meanings with or without inflection. According to previous studies on this subject, the inflection of verbs and nouns in archaic Chinese can come in many forms: adding a prefix or suffix, compounding, and zero-nominalization. In terms of semantics and syntactic, Zhu (1983) separated word formation of nominalized compounding forms, "suo VP” and “VP zhe” into zi zhi and zhuan zhi. Applying Zhu's findings on “suo VP” and“VP zhe” functions, the analysis of the semantic and syntactic properties of Chinese characters using the zuo zhuan, this paper seeks to incorporate the findings of both studies to extract the rules of nominalizations in archaic Chinese.Bachelor of Art