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

 583  Analysis of “full” words in Classical Chinese based on the Book of Laozi   both meanings are possible: 所苦 su k can mean either “what one regards as bitter” or “what one suffers from”. Without context is thus the phrase 所 苦 su k ambivalent. The above exposé is a good example of Nikitina’s method: two different words, albeit written with the same character and etymologically related, have different sets of constructions in which they occur, i. e. different syntac- tic paradigms . Words belonging to the same word class share similar syntac- tic paradigms. When the meanings do not split along syntactic paradigms (as in case of “bitter” and “hard”), we are dealing with two different meanings of a single lexeme; in the given case it is the basic and the figurative meaning. I also use the method of syntactic paradigms in the Dictionary while making decisions as far as the identity of lexemes is concerned. Nikitina further distinguishes so called “common” and “special” func- tions of the “full” word classes. The matter is, that if a word is used in its common function, its categorial meaning does not change, while in a special function such change is taking place. E. g. in the example mentioned above, both for the adjective “be bitter” and the verb “suffer”, the common func- tion is the function of predicative verb, their special functions being nominal functions. In unclear cases, for finding out which set of functions of a con- crete word is to be taken as basic i. e. common and which as special, Nikitina uses the statistic method. The crucial thing is, that the change of categorial meaning itself does not involve formation of a new word. In the present work, as far as Old Chinese words are concerned, I dis- tinguish equally to Gabelentz Wortkategorien , i.e. the fixed word class membership which one can record with the given lexeme in a dictionary and Redetheile , i. e. the syntactic function of the given word in the given construction. I call the former simply “word class”, the latter is referred to as “function”. Gabelentz for sake of terminological transparency used Ger- man terms for Wortkategorien and Latin terms for Redetheile . Due to the lack of other means I mark word classes with capital letters, functions with small letters. For example: 玄 xu n ADJ “be reddish-black”, figurative “be mysterious” > n “mystery”. We read this formula as follows: The word 玄 xu n which is lexically an adjective performs in the given construction the function of a noun. The situation is nevertheless more complex, according to my view. It seems that in certain cases there can take place derivation of a new lexeme as result of lexicalization of the changed categorial meaning. Subsequently such derived lexeme can be used in a new special function. Neither Gabelentz nor Nikitina mention this phenomenon, but according to the analysed material it is not unfrequent.