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

 591  Analysis of “full” words in Classical Chinese based on the Book of Laozi   would expect these images also to convey a material message (at least in pre- buddhist Chinese). This interpretation is grammatically also problematic: the modal adjec- tive 可 k ě is in most cases used in passive constructions (although an active usage is not excluded). The 3 rd person pronoun 其 qí in Classical Chinese was rarely used as an active subject of the main sentence. We have thus to try to read the given verse in a way which would make sense and at the same time would be grammatically plausible. In OC there is a very common word 左右 zu yòu with the meaning “as- sistant”, i. e. “people standing on the ruler’s left- and right-hand side”. The question is, whether the word 左右 zu yòu could have been used as a transi- tive verb and as such form the passive construction. (We remind that 可 k ě is a relatively reliable marker of passive.) In the Book of Changes under the hexagram 泰 Tài there is the expression 左右民 zu yòu mín which unambigu- ously means “to provide the people with assistance”. The condition is thus fulfilled and we can read the second part of the verse: “such can be given as- sistance”. By connecting both parts together, we will read the whole verse in the following way: “When the Great Dao (as the proper way of government) prevailed [like a flood], alas, such [rulers] could have been given assistance.” Let us notice that in this reading the pronoun 其 qí does not refer ana- phorically to the word 道 dào , but deictically to the ruler who has spread the proper way of government over the whole country. The question under what circumstances one should enter the ruler’s service was an often debated dilemma of old Chinese thinkers and in the Book of Laozi one reads about of- ficials serving the ruler according to the principles of the proper government (XXX). One can not find such interpretation in any traditional commentary or translation, but it seems to me being fairly plausible and giving more sense than the current interpretations. § 3. The word classes of “full” words and their syntactic functions In this work I am using basically the system of word classes introduced by T. N. Nikitina with some modifications. Similarly to Nikitina I consider the classification of the vocabulary into word classes being a pragmatic tool which should enable us a reasonable categorization of the language mate- rial and serve for explanation of as many as possible linguistic phenomena with minimum of means. At the same time, such classification should reflect the general cognitive schemes of the given language. Semantic as well as