Word-Class Flexibility in Classical Chinese: Verbal and Adverbial Uses of Nouns.

• Author: Goldin, Paul R.
• Position: Book review

Word-Class Flexibility in Classical Chinese: Verbal and Adverbial Uses of Nouns. By LUKAS ZADRAPA. Conceptual History and Chinese Linguistics, vol. 2. Leiden: BRILL, 2011. Pp. xii + 256. $151.

This is the first book-length study in any Western language of a familiar grammatical feature of Classical Chinese: the use of nouns in verbal or adverbial capacities. For example, according to Lukag Zddrapa, the word shui 71K 'water' can also be used to mean 'to flood with water', 'to swim', 'to be floods' (sic), 'to get flooded', 'to soak with water', and 'to spill water' (p. 127). In order to keep his study of such "word-class flexibility" to a manageable size, Zadrapa explicitly limits his inquiry to derivative uses of nouns; naturally, much more could be said about words derived from verbs and other parts of speech--and, as Zadrapa concedes (e.g., p. 136), in many cases it is not easy to tell which one of a word's various senses is the. "original" meaning. The Chinese term that Zadrapa freely adopts for "word-class flexibility" is huoyong Mill, which he abbreviates as "HY." (The other recurring abbrevia-tion in this book is "CC" for "Classical Chinese.")

Anyone who has read Classical Chinese texts will have noticed HY constructions, as they are a distinctive characteristic of the language, and Zadrapa's book thus promises to speak to broad classes of readers, including specialists in Chinese literature, Sinology, and so on. But he takes a strongly linguistic approach--which is by no means illegitimate, but reduces, in my view, the practical impact of his work. Word-Class Flexibility in Classical Chinese is based on Zadrapa's dissertation at the Charles University in Prague (2009), and displays the influence of the renowned Czech and Slovak linguistic tradition, as represented by such figures as Milog Dokulil, Josef Vachek, and Pavol 'Stekauer. Zddrapa's general thesis is that when HY is examined through the methodological lenses of cognitive grammar and radical construction grammar, it "does not differ cross-linguistically from other linguistic innovations" (p. 242); I take this to mean that although HY may feel distinctively Chinese, it is merely a particular example of a widespread linguistic phenomenon. (Zadrapa finds many parallel examples in English and Czech.) For cognitive grammar, Zadrapa relies on the work of Ronald W. Langacker; for radical construction grammar, his guide is William Croft. Together, publications by Langacker and Croft...