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

 579  Analysis of “full” words in Classical Chinese based on the Book of Laozi   § 1. Classical Chinese and its Analysis in the present Work By Classical Chinese we understand the language of Old Chinese writ- ten texts belonging to the period from the 5th century BC to the 2nd cen- tury AD. Classical Chinese in this understanding is thus a time-restricted written variant of the historically attested Old Chinese which was spoken in the Central States belonging to Chinese civilisation from ca. the 13th century BC. to the 8 th century AD. Old Chinese is therefore a substantially broader concept then Classical Chinese. From Classical Chinese one has to distinguish so-called 文言 W ny n which is the exclusively written style emerging during the Tang Dynasty imitating Classical Chinese. For the purpose of this work it is necessary to bear in mind that Classical Chi- nese, unlike W ny n , was based on the living language of its time — Old Chinese. Ch. Harbsmeier writes in his book Aspects of Classical Chinese Syntax : “But I am suggesting that it is not much of an exaggeration to say that our knowledge of Ancient Chinese is in many respects still at the stage that cor- responds to that of the student of Latin who reads De bello gallico with a crib hidden under his desk. It is not just that we have not got an adequate theory of AC grammar. ( That we could live with.) No, half the time we do not really know for sure what exactly AC sentences mean. And even when we feel sure what anAC sentence means we still are often uncertain how it comes to mean what apparently it does mean.” During 30 years that have passed from these words by Prof. Harbsmeier a little has changed in this sinological field qualitatively. The reasons for such state of being are surely manifold, at this place I want to mention at least one of them. The understanding of any text is given by 3 basic factors: grammar, lexicon and context. As far as the first two aspects are concerned, they are mostly studied as two independent disciplines and are very rarely combined together into one organic system. At the same time, the character of Classical Chinese as almost ideal isolating language needs a detailed investigation of the grammatical features not only of auxiliary, but most of all of the “full” words. Also the lexical meanings of “full” words of Old Chinese must still be subject of corrections and greater precision in different contexts with use of still subtler instruments. Grammar and dictionary which would be mutually interlinked and fully compatible is something what we are still missing in Old Chinese studies. In current grammars of Classical Chinese the syntactic relations are often described in very general terms: subject — predicate, predicative verb — ob- ject, attribute — head, etc. In such general analysis it seems that any “full”