漢語名詞性－動詞性考察

Investigation on Nounhood-Verbhood in Chinese

周國正(Chow Kwok-Ching)

《中國文化研究所學報》 42期 (2002/01) Pp. 469-495

https://doi.org/10.29708/JCS.CUHK.200201_(42).0018

並列摘要

This paper is an attempt neither to redefine nouns and verbs, nor to set new criteria for the distinction between nouns or verbs; rather, it aims at investigating the factors influencing the nounhood-verbhood of a lexical word from the perspective of pragmatic function. The statistics show that there are two factors at work: (1) the semantic property of a word and, (2) its pragmatic function in a sentence. Further investigation shows that nounhood and verbhood are in fact the grammatical realization of pragmatic function of words. That semantic property plays a role in affecting nounhood-verbhood is only because certain semantic properties (thing vs. action) tend to associate more closely with certain pragmatic functions (reference vs. predication). Whenever semantic property fails to coincide with its normal pragmatic function, the latter would play a more crucial role in determining the nounhood or verbhood of a word. The second part of this paper deals with the asymmetrical two-way shift between nouns and verbs. It is concluded that this asymmetry is also the result of the asymmetry between reference and predication which is at the root of nounhood and verbhood. Reference is an indispensable component of predication and predication can only function on the basis of reference. Depriving a verb of its predicative function, the remaining referring function would emerge, thus the nominalization common in languages.