从汉语的词类问题看汉语

On the Issues of Chinese Word Class and the Typology of Chinese

本文从汉语词类问题切入,重新诊断了其中的几个关键难题,指出词类本质上是词的语法意义的类,认为汉语词类内部其实并非是“名动包含”模式.文章还提出了新的“空形式的名物化标记”假设,这个看法统一厘清或解释了更多的事实,削减或根除更多的假设,破解了汉语词类的主要难题,诸如“这本书的出版”之类的结构其实既不违反“扩展规约”,也不违背“简约原则”.在此基础上,文章证明汉语其实是一种“显性标记少,隐性区别多”的语言,这个一“少”一“多”共同缔造了今日汉语之“表里不一”.汉语语法分析中所遇到的分歧或疑团在根本上其实并不直接源于汉语缺少或没有形态变化,而在于汉语的“表里不一”,汉语语法分析的千难万难都系于此,都因此而起.文章最后呼吁,革新汉语语法研究的理念,引入“空”的眼光,“重视汉语自身重视的区分”(沈家煊2015),不再为汉语的表面情形所惑,建立一个“虚、实、空”并重的新传统.

This paper revisits the key problems of lexical categories in Chinese. It argues that in essence lexical categories stem from the categorization of grammatical meanings, and that in Chinese verbs are not a subcategory of nouns. The paper proposes that a nominalizationer in Chinese is represented by empty form. This new hypothesis sheds light on many linguistic facts in Chinese, so that many other hypotheses proposed previously can now be modified or overturned and the primary difficulties in lexical classification can also be satisfactorily approached. In the light of this hypothesis, such constructions as zheben-shu-de chuban("the publication of this book") violates neither the principle of economy nor the head feature convention. We further argue that Chinese is a language rich in covert grammatical meanings, but impoverished in overt grammatical distinctions. This in turn results in the disparity between form and meaning. Many problems people run into undertaking grammatical studies of Chinese can be attributed to such disparity. Finally, we propose a new perspective in Chinese grammatical studies, that is, a perspective based on the notion of empty category. We advocate that attention should be paid to those distinctions are really crucial to the Chinese language. In this way, we will not be confused by those superficial phenomena. We can benefit tremendously from considering both the semantic and the grammatical aspects, and from the help of the notion of empty.