我看汉语的词类

My View of Word Classes in Chinese

在汉语词类问题上我们面临两个困境。困境一,做到"词有定类"就"类无定职",做到"类有定职"就"词无定类"。为摆脱这一困境,我们曾提出汉语跟其他语言一样,词类和句法成分之间符合普遍的"关联标记模式",结论是所谓"词类和句法成分之间缺乏一一对应的关系"并不是汉语的特点,汉语的词类也能跟句法成分的功能挂上钩。困境二,满足"简约原则"就违背"扩展规约",满足"扩展规约"就违背"简约原则"。为摆脱这一困境,我们提出汉语的词类系统中实词类属于"包含模式",不同于印欧语的"分立模式"。汉语和印欧语的根本区别在于,一个具体范畴投射到一个对应的抽象范畴,印欧语是"实现关系",而汉语是"构成关系",这就是"汉语缺乏形态"这一事实背后隐藏的认知上的深层原因。

There are two dilemmas in dealing with word classes in Chinese. One dilemma is that fixing word classes leads to unfixed syntactic functions and fixing syntactic functions leads to unfixed word classes. To extricate ourselves from this difficult position we put forward a universal model of Correlated Markedness and pointed out that Chinese also follows this model in the relations between word classes and syntactic functions. The second dilemma is that following the principle of simplicity （POS） leads to violating the head feature convention （HFC） and following HFC leads to violating POS. To extricate ourselves from this predicament we argue that unlike the situation in Indo-European languages, nouns, verbs, and adjectives in Chinese are not three separate word classes. In particular, in Chinese adjectives is a subcategory of verbs, which in turn a subcategory of nouns. The essential difference between Chinese and Indo-European languages lies in the fact that the former is constitutive while the latter is realizational in mapping a concrete category onto an abstract one. This paper holds this is the deep cognitive motivation behind the fact that Chinese is a language which lacks morphological inflections.