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

 526    Christoph Harbsmeier “ Explicit linguistic coding gets us into the right neighbourhood, in other words, but from there we have to find the right address by some other means ” 1 . Classical Chinese prose as well as prose is often creative in ad-hoc and imaginative ways that give it subtle poetic effects. No systemic grammar can hope to exhaust the nuances of interminably subtly innovative splendour. Symbols, Conventions and Abbreviations Bracketing It needs to be mentioned at the outset that the use of dots “ . ”, “ : ”, “ :. ” and “ :: ” in our analytic formulae is simply a painless way of marking bracketing by a convention inspired by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica (three vols. 1910, 1912, and 1913, second edi- tion 1927) . I have used the the shortened edition Principia Mathematica to *56, Cambridge: CUP, 1973. This work provided, indeed, the crucial early inspiration for the present effort towards the systematic philo-logical analysis of classical Chinese syntax. I feel I make sense of syntax exactly to the extent that I manage to make transparent its underlying logic. The formula vtoN.adV converts to brackets so that this is equivalent to (vtoN)adV . A very complex formula like npro.postN:adNPab:.adS cor- responds to ((npro(postN))adNPab)adS . 2 The limited task of the present survey is to identify most of those formulae which have been found useful in the lexical description of classical Chinese and to give prototypical examples which exemplify the structure analysed in the formulae. Square brackets in a formula, as in “ [X] ”, signify that the constituent X is implicit/omitted but retrievable/determinate by reference to a lexical rule in an imagined ideal lexicon of the language. Round brackets in a formula, as in “ (X) ”, signify that the constituent X is implicit/omitted but retrievable/determinate by reference to textual and pragmatic context. Curly brackets in a formula, as in “ {X} ”, signify that the semantic feature X applies to the constituent immediately preceding this bracketed expression. 1 Ronald W. Langacker, Metonymic Grammar, 2009: 46. 2 The process is strictly mechanical, to be sure.Atheoretically possible (i.e. well-formed) formula like vtoN.adV:postS is taken to correspond to ((vtoN)adV)adS . The formula vtoN.adN:postS_1:.adS_2 must be taken to correspond to (((vtoN)adN)postS_1)adS_2 . The formula vtoN.adN:postS_1:.adS_2::postadV would have to be taken to correspond to ( (((vtoN)adN)postS_1)adS_2)postadV .