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

 585  Analysis of “full” words in Classical Chinese based on the Book of Laozi   of view of the organicity of the whole system of word classes and their func- tions. I am leaving deliberately out the reconstructions of OC pronunciation and the attempts of reconstruction of the inner morphology of OC words, since these are mostly not based on detailed textual (contextual) analysis and they are still not very suitable for our purposes. § 2. General features of “full” words in Old Chinese Words are minimal units which enter into syntactic relations. Words in Old Chinese could have been monosyllabic, but also often di- or polysyl- labic. A wide-spread myth about Old Chinese is that it had monosyllabic vocabulary; in fact, even in such short text like Laozi we detect a number of di- and polysyllabic lexemes. The criterion for distinguishing between two independent words and a binome (polynome) is mainly the syntactic analysis into immediate constituents: when the meaning of an immediate constituent consisting of two units in relation to the meaning of the whole construction cannot be explained by a simple conjunction of the two meanings, we are probably dealing with a disyllabic word. Between both units there is thus a morphological and not syntactic interaction. I will give an example: The expression 不死 bù sǐ constitutes of two words if the meaning of the whole is “not die”, like in the sentence 敗而不死 “I was defeated but did not die.” ( Zuozhuan , 5, 15). Whereas in 不死之藥 “medicine of immortality” the expression 不死 bùsǐ does not mean “not die”, because it is not a “medicine which did not die”, nor it is a “medicine causing somebody not to die acutely”. According to my view, it is better to treat 不死 bùsǐ as one word, namely a disyllabic adjective “be immortal”, since it is a “medicine which causes somebody to become immortal”. The negation 不 bù is not more an independent adverb here, but a prefix by which other analogical adjectives can be formed, like 不 道 bùdào “be prematurely withered” etc. By the way, the same prefix of some adjectives has retained in Modern Chinese, e. g. in words like 不利 bùlì “be disadvantageous”, 不錯 bùcùo “be OK” and others. A disyllabic expression is often lexicalized as result of its unmarked nom- inalization, e. g. 可欲 k yù in the expression 不見 ( xi n ) 可欲 “Let us not show desirable things.” (III) The immediate constituent 可欲 k yù consists of two predicative units, but as a whole it is a nominal object of the pre- dicative verb 見 xi n . I regard it as disyllabic noun, because the further IC analysis would be in contradiction to the meaning of the whole construction. Moreover, the morpheme 可 k is a also prefix of some adjectives in Modern