圆融自洽 后出转精——《汉语的双音化》述评

A Review of The Disyllabifi cation in Chinese

汉语的双音化问题,历久弥新,是汉语(史)研究的重要议题;其背后的动因更是汉语(史)研究亟待解决的重大问题。《汉语的双音化》应时而作,在以往研究的基础上,构建理论,从词法、句法、词汇化三个角度讨论了双音化的运作方式。该书系统、全面、深入,具有较高的启发性。

The disyllabification in Chinese,being an important issue in the study of Chinese grammar as well as the history of Chinese,has challenged many scholars in the past 80 years.Many accounts have been put forward since Guo Shaoyu(1938),thus paving the way for a sound explanation.The Disyllabification in Chinese,coauthored by Zhuang Huibin,Zhao Pusong and Feng Shengli,has provided a new perspective for this topic—prosody.On the basis of previous studies,this book establishes a new theoretical framework from prosody,and explains disyllabification from three aspects,i.e.,morphology,syntax and lexicalization.The book consists of seven chapters.The introductory chapter demonstrates the general features discovered in the history of the Chinese language.Chapter Two provides a review of previous studies both at home and abroad.The authors summarize the literature into two main accounts:the functional account and the prosodic account.The former consists of reimbursing,functional contrasting,rhetorical aesthetics,and social requirements,while the latter consists of rhythmic preference,elastic words,and foot shifting.Finally,the present study points out that only a foot shift account can explain the disyllabification of Chinese.Chapter Three lays out a theoretical foundation for disyllabification.It is believed that the weakening and dropping of coda of syllables in Old Chinese triggers the foot shift,and disyllabification begins,as a result.Chapters Four to Six discuss the disyllabification from three points of view,namely,morphology,syntax and lexicalization.In Chapter Four,three main means of morphological disyllabification are provided,that is,reduplication,clipping and summarization.Chapter Five focuses on syntactic operations of disyllabification,i.e.,syntactic words,incorporation and syntactic gap-filling.Chapter Six mainly points out that lexicalization,being a consequence of disyllabification,also contributes in this process.Chapter Seven,the last chapter,discusses the influence of disyllabification,which not only enlarges the vocabulary of Chinese,but also causes a lot of problems,such as blurring the boundary of word classes as well as bringing the difficulty of collocating.After the summary,the current author provides his own evaluation of the book.He praises that the book achieves a high standard in several aspects:literature review,unified account,self-sufficient explanation,and in-depth observation.The last part is the conclusion.