Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 539  A Summary of Classical Chinese Analytic Syntax...   6. Vt{NUM} “transitive verbals, simple or complex”. 6.1. vt{NUM}oN@caus “cause to be X times as many” liù liù s n shí liù 六 六三十六 SIX SIX THREE TEN SIX “If you multiply six by six this is thirty-six." [NB: Liù 六 “cause N to be six times as many”]. 6.2. vt{NUM}oN@sequence “Be the Xth in the matter of N” tài shǐ bā zhī 太 史八之。 GRAND ARCHIVIST EIGHT IT “The Grand Archivist was the eighth in this matter...” GY 國語 Zhōu 1, ed. Shànghǎigǔjí 1978, 1.20. 6.3. vt{NUM}oN@strength “be X times superior to N” y u r n y cǐ bǎi zǐ 有人於此百子 EXIST PERSON IN THIS HUNDRED YOU “Suppose there is someone here who is a hundred times your superior”. Thus the category of numerals turns out to be no word class or syntactic category at all. Number words may function variously as verbal, nominal, “adnominal”, “adverbial” and so on. It is as absurd to speak of a word class of numerals as it would be to speak of a word class of plants. (Try to make a list of the syntactic functions of the English words “two, three, four, five”. Comment on the contrasts between English and Chinese number!) Prefixes are taken as particles preceding and modifying a main nomi- nal or verbal constituent. padN m 阿母 INTIMATE-PREFIX MOTHER “mother” **Early col- loquial** padV zài chǐ zài qū 載馳載驅 CONTINUATIVE-PREF GALOP CONTIN- UATIVE-PREF GALLOP “(I) was rac ing along and (I) was rush ing along” [NB: One may evidently quarrel about the exact nuance expressed by zài 載 .] **The question of reconstructed initial consonant prefixes within syllables are analysed separately within the context of the systematic reconstruction of historical phonology.** Prepositions are taken as transitive verbs with lexically retrievable implicit subjects, but this analysis — like everything else — remains open to further discussion: The word “preposition” labels a problem and does not solve any problem. What I try to do here, as best I can, is to explicate what it typically is, from our philo-logical point of view, for a word to be a preposition. I try to explain prepositions syntactically as grammaticalised or specialised “deficient” non- negatable subordinate verbs with obligatorily omitted and lexically regularly