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

 586  David Sehnal   Chinese and it is possible that we are dealing here with its precursor, what is useful to bear in mind. As auxiliary criteria one can make use of the frequency of the given ex- pression or analogy with other observed phenomena. Generally it is possible to say that where a disyllabic (polysyllabic) expression can be interpreted on both syntactic or morphological levels, in this work I am in favour of the morphological one. Any “full” word may be subject of various regular shifts of meaning. 1. The most often one is the transposition of the basic meaning into de- nomination of a different reality according to metaphorical rules. An exam- ple of such shift is the word 道 dào “way” used often in the meaning of “method”, “way of doing things”. The English word ‘way’ or the German ‘der Weg’ are used similarly. It is true that the Old Chinese metaphors were by far not that transparent and here lies one of the crucial difficulties in un- derstanding the text. 2. Narrowing of the meaning: OC nouns and verbs tend sometimes to narrow their meaning by addition of the semantic feature “the proper”, “the right one”, “the relevant”, respectively “to do something properly”, “to mas- ter something perfectly” etc. With the nouns, the same effect can be reached by addition of the deictic pronoun 其 qí “the relevant”. For example: 道 dào “way” figuratively “method”, in narrowed sense “the proper meth- od” 時 shí “time”, in narrowed sense “the proper time” 人 r n “human” in narrowed sense “the right person” 知 zhī “understand something” in narrowed sense “understand something properly” 用人 yòng r n “employ the others” in narrowed sense “employ the others in the right manner” This kind of emphasis ( 特指化 ) can be reached also in other languages by prosodical means without any formal markers. 3. Usage of the word in a specific sense: It is such meaning of the word which is related to the basic or figurative one, but which is uneasy to be de- rived according to the general rules and it does not constitute an independent syntactic paradigm. To such meaning we are often lead solely by the logic of the utterance. It is not said that it has to be necessarily an obscure meaning